70 years after Berenice Abbott

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Three things that struck me when viewing the New York Changing exhibit at the City Museum in NYC:

# The amount of texture in the city has decreased thanks to Modernism, and perhaps proportional to increasing clutter in the rest of our mindscape.
# Industrial decline has opened up waterfronts, for better or worse. (I’m too young to remember the working waterfronts of yore.)
# The invasion of cars has changed the city in truly profound, but now forgotten, ways. More obviously, their sheer bulk makes streets feel unpleasantly crowded, as a view down Seventh Ave. shows. More subtly, their unprecedented (and ever increasing) momentum, and thus their capacity to injure those in the public way, resulted in an alarming increase in regulation of street use, as government attempted to mitigate the invading cars’ size and speed — most notably parking restrictions, one way designations, and the ubiquitous all-way stops, all seen in this otherwise unchanged view at 39 Commerce Street. Two way streets were converted to one way operation to remove the annoyance of yielding when passing on narrow streets; stop signs and speed bumps appeared to keep speeds down and to avoid crashes, as intersections could accommodate only one car at a time; licensing of drivers and vehicles began only after the first cars were involved in deadly hit-and-runs.

In that brief-but-glorious era when bicycles were the second most popular vehicles on American city streets (after shoes), there was precious little need for such over-regulation of traffic flow. Critical Massers understand that large numbers of cyclists can pretty spontaneously organize and police themselves. Even if bicyclists (with 2% the weight and 0.2% the horsepower, and thus about 0.004% the motive force of an SUV) who slow down and yield, rather than stop, at stop signs violate the letter of laws created to regulate autos, I’d argue that we respect the intent of the law (i.e., slow, quiet traffic flow with orderly queueing). Just because we don’t trust drivers to drive politely and let one another in in traffic — which we might accomplish with, say, yield rather than stop signs — hardly means that pedestrians or bicyclists can’t be trusted with the same.

I understand that the laws we have now are the laws we should observe, but a fairly good historical — not just logical — argument exists to grant bicycles leeway on traffic regulations. And if today’s federal judges can “revive the Constitution in exile” and impart judgment based on “historical intent,” then surely we can find some judges to revive 19th century, pre-Auto Plague traffic codes for bicycles!

Guess where: compass rose

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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.

Daley dome envy, migration, High Line boom

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* A few years after knocking down Soldier Field to build the new Bears stadium (one of the smallest in the NFL), Daley has suggested “getting a new NFL team”:http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=18914 — not because they’d win more than the division-leading Bears, but because he wants an Olympic dome. Uhm, okay, so why didn’t he support LPCI’s plan to leave well enough alone at Soldier Field and build a new dome in Bridgeport, next to the Sox stadium? As Roger Ebert pointed out in the Sun-Times lately, _Detroit_ got the Super Bowl this year because they have a dome. Meanwhile, a dome in Bridgeport would solidify opportunities to build more sports-related entertainment venues there, give more weeks of life to the often-empty Sox parking garages, and provide the city with a new indoor venue with better transportation than the lakefront.

* An interesting, if dated, table found in a 1999 paper by Dowell Myers entitled “Demographic Dynamism and Metropolitan Change” shows that, among other things, NYC is really no more of a national draw than Chicago, and that Blacks in large metros actually have higher mobility rates than Whites. Wouldn’t be hard to get Census 2000 numbers; some numbers I’ve seen for LA have shown that Asian and Latino immigration has slowed, and a new generation of second(+) generation immigrants has matured. (Left out a line about migrants from US territories, i.e., Puerto Rico, and numbers for DC.)

*Place of Birth of 1990 Adult (>24) Residents, by Race-Ethnicity*
|*Los Angeles* region|Total|White|Black|Asian|Latino|
|California|27.5%|31.7%|27.8%|9.3%|23.2%|
|Other states|42.2%|57.5%|66.7%|6.2%|9.8%|
|Other nations|30.1%|10.8%|5.3%|83.5%|66.1%|
|*New York* region|Total|White|Black|Asian|Latino|
|NY, NJ, CT|57.6%|73.4%|37.2%|3.9%|17.6%|
|Other states|14.0%|12.0%|37.3%|1.9%|1.4%|
|Other nations|24.5%|14.6%|25.0%|93.9%|50.9%|
|*Chicago* region|Total|White|Black|Asian|Latino|
|IL, IN, WI|60.5%|71.0%|47.4%|4.2%|19.2%|
|Other states|23.7%|19.7%|50.5%|5.1%|9.5%|
|Other nations|14.7%|9.4%|2.0%|90.6%|58.4%|

* Claire Wilson in the “Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/realestate/18cover.html reports on how developers have swooped down upon the High Line, proposing 13 towers with 5,500 apartments, media offices, star-chef restaurants, new gallery spaces, and a Standard Hotel. Assuming an average of $1M per apartment (modest even after accounting for a 20% inclusionary set-aside), just the residential development spurred by the $130M High Line project would be worth $5.5 billion!

“Developers balked — and some who wanted it torn down threatened to sue — when Friends of the High Line was formed in 1999 and proposed the idea of turning the railroad bed into an elevated park. Six years later, the corridor is like catnip to the same developers, with more than a dozen projects planned and countless others being considered.”

Honolulu

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Waikiki’s physical form is a row of ’60s slabs perpendicular to the beach; as JCB-toting Japanese tourists have displaced fat, ugly Americans, “boardwalk” has evolved (partly, which is the fun part) from t-shirt shops to marquee-name couture boutiques. Prada sits three doors down from a peep show joint. The truly wild thing is that Ala Moana, the near-downtown megamall less than a mile west, has all the same shops, plus oddball Hawaiian locals like the “Crack Seed Center” (a bulk candy and roasted-nut shop). Since the economy’s tied more to Tokyo than DC, there’s a lot of ’80s glitter but surprisingly little new since then, save a few monuments to the very latest real estate bubble.

High property values, high value agriculture, consolidated local government, and lack of buildable land (between coast and mountain, as they say in Vancouver) means relatively compact sprawl and bad congestion, even in the absence of any noticeable job center. Only downtown and the adjoining Chinatown have any real historic-district merit; it’s overwhelmingly a postwar city, and the “real” neighborhoods have that sunstruck, run-down look of, say, San Diego. (Not as dirty as LA, much less rain than Miami.) Ethnic restaurants are aplenty, but bohemia seems in little evidence: the only band posters I saw were in Hale’iwa, the little surfer town at the gateway to the North Shore’s heroic waves.

Bus transit is excellent, many intersections have scramble signals, and downtown has a ped mall, a bike/bus mall, little surface parking, and an old-line department store, besides the usual government offices in an old royal palace.

The overall feel crosses Las Vegas with Miami Beach and Myrtle Beach, but filled with pushy Asians. (whites are less than 25% of the population, and maybe half of the 100,000 tourists.) Just as strangely un-American as Canada in many ways, like the lack of major crime, residential high-rises in odd places, indifference to the Protestant work ethic and news from the mainland, and an oddly communitarian local political culture — apparently dating from the early days, of Japanese settlers, New England missionaries, and money-grubbing Yankee capitalists mingling with famously laid-back native Hawaiians.

Photos Flickr-ed to my “West Coast”:http://flickr.com/photos/paytonc/sets/462801/ set.

Metro briefs

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* “Metropolis 2020”:http://metrojoe.org/joe.htm has posted a quiz game featuring “Metro Joe.” It has annoyingly slow animated transitions, questions that are pretty tough given the 8th grade target audience (although I haven’t seen the accompanying curricular materials), and the scoring’s a bitch: you actually lose points for incorrect answers, instead of just not winning them.
* Found a site that appears to “take credit for”:http://counterproductiveindustries.com/ much of the street theater that’s gone on in Chicago in recent years — except Critical Mass.
* Beerfly Lew Bryson has “a heartwarming read”:http://www.lewbryson.com/buzz703.htm for the “Draught Beer Preservation Society”:http://www.westnet.com/~kbehrens/lsdbps/manifesto.html:

bq. Who’s the villain here? Zoning and NIMBY. Zoning is NIMBY, which is policy-speak for Not In My Backyard… What [overly restrictive zoning in the suburbs produces] is a noisy bar that’s creating drunks. The owner may not have had that in mind, but that’s where business and zoning has driven him. Bars are caught between rising costs, public disapproval, and stiff chain competition. Is it any wonder that corner bars owners are cashing out left and right, taking big bucks for their licenses and folding up?

bq. Here’s what I’d like to see instead. If we’re going to live in the suburbs, I’d like to see subdivisions with an in-built commercial area: a grocery store (not a supermarket, a grocery store, with food), a coffee shop/deli, and a bar. And they’d have no parking. None. Just bike racks. You’d have to walk or ride there. The bar would have to close at 11, no loud music allowed. It would be a special license, a neighborhood tavern license: non-transferable, stuck to that address, and cheap, say $300 a year. They’d have to serve food: simple sandwiches, soup, stews, salads. It wouldn’t be a nuisance, it couldn’t be a nuisance.

bq. Sound like much ado about nothing? After all, do you really have to have a neighborhood bar? Consider this. Do you ever get together with neighbors and talk politics? Have you met your state legislators, your township supervisors, your school board? Your parents did, your great-grandparents did, the country’s founders did: at the local tavern.

Going away for a week to celebrate Solstice in sunnier climes. Happy Holidays, damnit.

Starting to get it

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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.

No smoking

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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.

Corbu

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Who would’ve known? “Corbu” (and its counterpart, “petit Corbu”) is a variety of red grape used for winemaking in the Pyrenees. Of course, it’s “very minor and always blended”:http://www.french-regional-wines.co.uk. Saw it on a wine list last week and, well, wasn’t terribly pleased with the inky, tannic result, but that could have been the blend.

In My Back Yard

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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.