Death of a Mountain

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Stumbled across an online copy of Erik Reece’s “Death of a Mountain,” an article I sharply remember from the April 2005 Harper’s as a paragon of well-written environmental journalism:

September 26, 2004, Lost Mountain

It was one year ago this month that I first came to Lost Mountain. When I look back at the pictures I took then, I see dense stands of trees and rolling ridgetops painted orange and yellow by autumn coolness. Now I see a long gray plateau piled with mounds of wasted rock and soil. It’s drizzling as I start up the eastern slope. Today is a Sunday, as it was a year ago, and the rain has kept even the smaller weekend crews away. At about 1,400 feet, I begin walking along the top edge of a long highwall that marks the eastern boundary of the land permitted for mining. This cliff line drops about 100 feet down to the number 10 coal seam, where several pyramids of coal stand ready to be loaded away.

I’m walking along a thin strip of soil here at the edge of the highwall that divides the strip mine from the forest. The oaks and maples descend down into the watershed on my right, and the highwall drops away abruptly to my left. The sharp contrast between these two landscapes, heightened by the fall color and the gray mine site, gives me the strange sensation that I am walking on the edge of Creation, on a thin membrane between the world and the not-world. Everything past this point is an abyss, a lifeless canvas, a preternatural void.

It’s also a book.

Preview upcoming shows

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I’m perpetually confusedly by concert listings — whether tiny flyers or full-page _Reader_ ads, they all amount to a tightly packed, practically illegible list screaming a bunch of punny band names, dates, and times, perhaps with a meaningless photo of rocker dudes in some weird getup or a tiny bit of explanatory text that means almost nothing and/or references yet more bands you’ve never heard of. (I know, it’s only because I’m not cool enough to be a total record snob and/or don’t regularly sleep with talent scouts.) Surely there’s a better way, like a by-day list of acts with little MP3 previews built right in, like Podbop. It doesn’t have 100% coverage, but does answer the question “where to go on Thursday?” much better than anything else out there.

Shimmering boxes do not a city make

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Paul Goldberger, writing in Metropolis, sees an opportunity for urbanism lost amidst the gleaming curtain-wall residential towers:

bq. When glass residential buildings were rare, they had a graceful effect on the cityscape: light objects playing off against masonry. But just as the Seagram Building lost some of its luster when its masonry neighbors on Park Avenue were replaced by inferior glass buildings, we are beginning to run the risk of seeing glass become not the appealing counterpoint to the stone city but the new standard. And it doesn’t work well at that. The allure of glass — its brittleness and precision, the way it seems to bedazzle and at the same time keep you at a distance — can sometimes make beautiful buildings, but it’s less likely to make appealing street-scapes. This is not the place to get into Modernism’s urbanistic failings, which involve far more than material choices, but walking alongside a glass building doesn’t provide the subtle embrace that richly textured stone or even brick does. It is a paradox: stone, heavy and opaque, pulls you closer; glass, light and transparent, keeps you at a distance. I have tried to avoid using words like warm and cold, but it is hard not to conclude that glass is cold and masonry warm. A cold object can be stunningly beautiful, but one cannot make a whole street out of them, and streets are the mortar of civilizing cities. Masonry buildings make streets; glass buildings make objects.

Vancouver has partially solved the problem by requiring heavier materials toward ground level while allowing the towers to float into the sky, but not quite: the overall feeling (perhaps intentional) is still far too airy and light, with little of the intimacy one expects of urban spaces. The literal lack of dirt and grit in the glass and steel confines of recent spaces, unrelieved even by the ubiquitous textured cement of Brutalist-era modernism, makes one wonder how these places will age.

Building on the election

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Sharon Stangenes reports on developer David Hill in the Chicago Tribune:

Critical to success, in Hill’s view, is a stable political environment for the several years it takes to get a development done. Also needed: a clean, clear decision trail so projects are not bogged down during the local government approval process.

“The issue of density in today’s world needs to be rethought,” he said. “If the political authorities recognized they have major working family problems and they have well-intentioned developers — and there are many — they can provide added density to offset the cost of the land.”

Well, sure, but if last week’s election is any guide, we’re not about to rethink no steeeenkin’ density issues, nor are we about to consider a reasonably clear decision trail for planning and development. Hayley, the YoChicago reporter in Edgewater, thinks it mighty strange that “only 4 precincts (30, 38, 50 & 51) got to voice their opinion on Broadway’s commercial development.” Sure, 80% of the voters voted to keep heights down to four stories — absurd on a street as wide as Broadway — but naturally, those were only those living in the least dense of the blocks adjoining Broadway. The denser blocks to the north and east? Their opinions don’t matter.

Even stranger is the Pilsen downzoning referendum passed in retaliation to the inclusionary-zoned loft conversions (particularly David Hill’s, actually) seeping into the largely abandoned industrial district running along the Sangamon rail spur. (What’s even stranger is that the area was TIFed over resident objections, but that’s good now: the increased tax base will now have to be spent within the community, not elsewhere.) The downzoning peculiarly uses these developments as ammo for a completely unrelated measure: downzoning the adjacent blocks from RT4 flats to single-family RS3. To a certain extent, I understand that Pilsen residents are concerned that property values, which they’ve successfully managed for decades by trading property mostly by word of mouth, will rise to market levels as Realtors blab to outside buyers. Pilsen is one of the city’s best kept secrets, and they understandably want to keep it that way. Yet on principle, it’s silly to consider reusing vacant land to be an affront to the community.

In Houston, as John Buntin of Governing reports in a cover story on gentrification, a city councillor is directing TIF revenues from redevelopment of an industrial zone to secure long-term affordability easements in an adjacent neighborhood threatened by gentrification:

The [Midtown TIF] board has chosen to use almost all its revenues — $10 million in the past five years — to purchase and then ‘bank’ land in the Third Ward. ‘If you look at Midtown, that was all publicly induced — ain’t none of it affordable,’ says [Garnet] Coleman [city councillor for the ward]. ‘Why can’t we do the same thing for people who need an affordable place to live?’ … An essential part of [Coleman’s] plan is to attach restrictive deeds to the rental properties to ensure that they are never sold to private developers[.]

Overall, these advisory referenda are a nice way to do a poll on the cheap, but any elected official who takes these numbers too seriously deserves what s/he gets. What’s often a limited subset of the ward’s residents (as the referenda appear only in certain precincts) even get to vote, and even then only those who do vote (excluding the young, noncitizens, non-voters, etc.) get to have a say. Of course, we know that those with NIMBY tendencies — middle age, middle class homeowners — are the likeliest to vote, so these often do nothing to substantially broaden public participation beyond the current NIMBY neighborhood organizations.

The Houston article ends on an appropriately cynical note: “the gentrification debate, [former mayor Bob] Lanier says, ‘is substantially about political control.’ “

Odd parcels

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Perhaps one reason why Haussmann-style diagonal boulevards never made it in Chicago is because Chicago (governed as we are by mayors, not an emperor) was unwilling to condemn and demolish enough of the old fabric. Paris demolished so much that the subdivisions could be re-platted into continuous buildable lots fronting the boulevards. In Chicago, newer diagonals like Ogden Extension never meshed into the built fabric and thus never built a constituency — the remnant lots lining them, if they were ever built, house only hot dog stands and garages.

Meanwhile, our diagonals have a way of disappearing under the grid. UIC knocked out a huge chunk of Blue Island. Clark once flowed into Rush. Parts of Kingsbury have reverted to dust over the years. Much of the Indian Boundary (Forest Preserve & Rogers) was probably never even paved before the grid arrived to then-new suburbs like West Ridge. Cottage Grove got sliced for Lake Meadows and the freeway between 24th and 33rd; a rump remnant, the saddest little street in all Chicago, ran from 24th Place (an access road along I-55) to a cul-de-sac just short of Cermak, fronted with an odd pile of abstract sculpture (the “dancing french fries”). It was lined solely with McPier parking lots, yet it had fresh bike lanes. Alas, it’s joined its fellow segments in urban renewal’s dustbin, subsumed by the colossal McCormick Place West.

Diagonal rail spurs, like the Seminary branch off the Lakewood line headed to Wrigley, also melt back into the grid when abandoned. Meanwhile, the old right angles of Lake Shore Drive’s S-curve live on as the Cancer Survivors’ Garden.

Megabus, Euro LCC in Midwestern bus market

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The Megabus USA service launched online today, with a press conference at Navy Pier closely following some bus-stop ads placed recently. (Just noticed one yesterday on Michigan Avenue.) The pricing model, like the company, is imported from the real-time yield management models used by European low cost carriers like Ryanair, EasyJet, BMIbaby, and budget hotels like Thomson; according to the Trib:

“At least three or four seats on each one-way trip are available for a $1 fare. At the upper end, one-way fares will range from $9 to $27.50, depending on the city.”

The real breakeven point is well above $1, but the supercheap fares entice the revenue paying passengers in a bit of bait-and-switch.

I’m not sure why they’re launching in the Midwest, except that Greyhound here has no competition (Chinatown bus, ahem). I don’t know how deep the intercity travel market is here (in any case, not nearly as deep as the much more densely populated East), but lower fares might just bring out an entire new population of day-tripping or weekly-commuting travelers between closer city pairs.

Schadenfreude: Vegas monorail junked

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An AP article reports on financial trouble and “restructuring” at the privately financed “Las Vegas Strip monorail”:https://westnorth.com/2005/09/30/its-called-public-transit/ :

bq. Ridership on the monorail in January fell to 18,200 a day from a peak of 33,000 a day in July 2005, prompting Fitch Ratings last month to cut the rating on $451.4 million in first-tier bonds to junk status. Fare revenue for 2005 totaled $30.2 million, just more than half of the forecast when the bonds were sold, Fitch said.

That’s a deadly weapon you’ve got there

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Continuing on North Shore news, Lisa Black wrote in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune on a proposed “distracted driving” ban in Winnetka — one that would go further than the woefully limited, completely unenforced mobile-phone ban passed by Chicago last year. Yet unlike countless articles about driving-while-talking, which somehow strikes some as UnFreedom-istic, this one hints at the bigger problems: an epidemic of selfishness and willfull denial that cars are deadly weapons.

Irwin Askow, 90, who was a village board president in the 1970s, pushed for a law barring drivers from using cell phones around 2000, when he was almost struck by a car.

“I was crossing the street in Winnetka and was almost run over — missed me by 2 inches — a lady driving an SUV and talking on the cell phone,” said Askow, who still supports the law, though he now lives in Evanston. “She didn’t even see me. She didn’t stop at all.”

[Resident Bernadette] Wolff said she believes distracted driving is a symptom of a broader societal problem.

“I think we have all become very self-absorbed and self-important,” Wolff said.

Perhaps everyone needs a reminder, she said: “This is a big vehicle. Pay attention.”

Still not pointed out: a driver conversing with a passenger will probably get positive feedback about watching the road (like, “hey, watch out for that tree!”), quite unlike one talking into a tiny plastic box.

In any case, drivers should expect to lose their “rights” when exercising the privilege of waving around a deadly weapon in the public way. I’d even favor streetcorner cameras to catch those who blatantly violate the hundreds of laws that supposedly protect us against deadly or selfish driving: speeding, refusing to stop or yield for pedestrians, loud engines, and hit-and-run crashes, for instance.

Gentrification wanted in Waukegan

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Josh Noel and Barbara Bell report in the Tribune that condo sales have started, among the first steps in the city’s ambitious “downtown plan”:http://www.cnu.org/about/index.cfm?formAction=project_view&templateInstanceID=818.

bq. [Developer John Bergeron] makes no apologies for the price of the units, despite what he called the “non-believers” who say enough buyers can’t be lured there. Anything is possible, he said, if the condos can project the North Shore’s image of affluence. “That’s the only way you’re going to be able to change the perception of Waukegan,” he said. “In a matter of a few years, you’re going to see an amazing transformation.”

bq. Among the skeptics is Skokie developer Chris Rintz of New England Developers, which built a 350-condominium development called HarborPark along the lakefront in Kenosha. The major difference between the two is price, he said. In Kenosha, about 20 miles north, units cost $80,000 to $300,000 and all look onto Lake Michigan. “Just because you can see the lake doesn’t mean you can charge North Shore prices,” Rintz said. “I don’t think Waukegan is significantly different from Kenosha.”

Not significantly different, but different enough: just two towns past the North Shore, and right in the middle of Illinois’ wealthiest county. Yes, $200-$900K is pretty rich and I’m not sure that Chicagoans are necessarily the right target market, but the North Shore as a whole is pretty starved for any multifamily product.