yay! 100 photos at Flickr! (and to think I doubted the value of a pro membership.) I went ahead and posted some from NYC just to be able to share with the world.
Devon dilemma
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.
Unpatriotic MREs
Contrary to the claims of some, the retort pouch — the foil-and-plastic thing (essentially a can married to a Ziploc bag) that precooked Indian food, camping food, military or humanitarian Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) rations, and astronaut meals come in — were not invented for the Apollo program, but for the Nazis. True, they didn’t really work until the intersection of plastics research and the Apollo program in the 1960s, but still that MRE might not be as all-American as it’s made out to be.
Last week’s absence of posts was due to a vacation last weekend (NYC–as always, photos eventually, once I’ve had time to pick through them with a fine toothed comb and then crop, resize, optimize, and adjust the contrast and angle and exposure) and a flurry of work ahead of a few deadlines this month. In particular, I’m presenting at Greening the Heartland and Transport Chicago (thankfully the same paper, but it’s not done yet!), all in the week just prior to CNU XIII.
More simply, I’m going to have to leave some things unfinished until the tide passes, sometime in June.
Forget all those friends
The name “Thousand Friends of…” may have had meaning when first used in Oregon, but makes increasingly little sense when it’s applied to smart-growth groups across the land. A better name idea: Greater Ohio, which connotes metropolitan regions while retaining an aspirational bent.
DIY urban reclamation
Heavy Trash, an LA public art collective, takes direct action against gated communities by offering the public a way to view (or maybe snipe at) them:
Like the historic viewing platforms at the Berlin Wall that allowed Westerners to see into East Berlin, the Heavy Trash viewing platforms call attention to the walls of gated communities and provide visual access to parts of the city that have been cut off from the public domain.
Their earlier one-ton metal access stair to grant the public access to a fenced-off park is just brilliant.
Today in transit funding
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.
Big pile of rocks
…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.”
Bungalow courts
The bungalow court came up on a short call with an architect last week, in reference to one building type native to Pasadena (ca. 1909, Sylvanus Marston). Although I was certainly aware of the type from movies (like the Bavarian Village in Silverlake — the apartment complex in “Mulholland Drive”), my knowledge of California courtyard housing is mostly limited to often-Mission Revival courtyards of attached and sometimes stacked maisonettes or flats. However, newly built courts of detached bungalows or cottages have proved popular in the Northwest, and the housing type might have new relevance in the era of the not-so-big house. It seems remarkably appropriate for multifamily infill within established single-family neighborhoods, or for difficult, deep sites within new towns where one might otherwise be tempted to put a cul-de-sac. Perhaps best of all, the small increments of the plan mean that it can be adapted for almost any site or market preference, with an endless variety of plans.
The National Register of Historic Places has a scanned document (ca. 1978; 5MB PDF) giving names, addresses, and descriptions for dozens of bungalow courts in Pasadena. It would be interesting to go around and see what shape they’re in today; I’ll look for a few in June.
For some more photos, scroll down to Bungalow Courts in this slide-show outline from UCSB.
A 1988 survey of San Diego’s bungalow courts and their residents found that not only has this housing type withstood the test of time–80% were still intact, 70 years after their heyday — but that they were well-liked by their diverse residents, with only 5% of the respondents dissatisfied. The courts were primarily located along streetcar lines in the then-new neighborhoods just north of Balboa Park, and many were marketed to single women (then a brand-new household type) as a neighborly, familial middle ground between expensive homeownership and hedonistic apartment life.
Many individual courts acquired social identities over time; some courts were still filled with single women who all moved in decades ago. The reasons for the courts’ passage into history seems simple but stupid in retrospect: “Due to the unfathomable popularity of the two-story ‘dingbat’ apartment complex, eight units could now be crammed onto one city lot complete with off-street parking. It is probably also true that apartment seekers in the 1960s (like everyone else) wanted modern dwellings with gleaming kitchens and green shag carpeting.” In addition, bungalow courts’ small units and lack of attached garages may have turned away potential occupants.
Gentrification today
Mary Schmich in “the Tribune”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0504220132apr22,1,3865394.column?coll=chi-business-hed points out that gentrification’s ghosts leave behind a fuzzy, indeterminate context:
There are other ghosts, too, old people I used to see ambling on the sidewalks. Occasionally the ghost of one will appear for no apparent reason except to say, “Hey, you hadn’t even noticed I was gone.” They’re right. Walking past the palazzos I can’t always remember what was there before, or who.
John Greenfield once pointed this out: when a building or store disappears, even if it was something you saw every day for years, its memory fades alarmingly rapidly. Obviously, grandmother’s house or the daily bakery are exceptions, but I’ve noticed it countless times.
In Pilsen, the “latest flare in the gentrification battles”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0504220158apr22,1,2295748.story?coll=chi-business-hed appears to be a loft conversion by Steve Lipe. Lipe has done quite a bit of groundwork (negotiating early on with a local CDC, not advertising the project outside the community, hiring Latino sales staff, and rehabbing an abandoned building so as not to displace any residents in densely populated Pilsen) but he nonetheless provides an easy target for easily confused, angry activists.
bq. Balderas, a project opponent, acknowledged that many residents would view the project more favorably if the newcomers were of Mexican descent, but just because the potential homebuyers are Hispanics who made good doesn’t mean that they should take precedence over longtime residents, she said. “We’re the ones who did all the hard work to make Pilsen a better place. But we’re not going to benefit from it. They are,” Balderas said.
bq. Chantico Lofts has caused a split among advocates of affordable housing. Some say Pilsen residents should fight developers tooth-and-nail while others want to become partners to create mixed-income projects.
The next level of fake places
The three-dimensional evocation of stylish urban places on behalf of crass commercialism that began with lifestyle centers is now migrating beyond the private streets with fake parking meters; it’s now seeped into the stores themselves. Witness the names of the two latest, “more sophisticated” concepts from Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch:
�We created an address with the name �Forth & Towne�, because we wanted it to evoke a sense of place — to signify a special and unique shopping destination. �Forth� references our fourth brand, and �Towne� conveys a sense of community that we want to create for our customers when they shop with us.� –Gary Muto President, Forth & Towne, the new division of Gap aimed at boomer women
“The [Ruehl No. 925] exterior resembles a Greenwich Village town house. Why? Well, Abercrombie & Fitch Chairman and CEO Michael S. Jeffries created a background story for the new concept worthy of a Victorian novel. In fact, it is the embellished tale of a real immigrant German family, the Ruehls, who settled in New York City in the late 19th century and founded a leather goods business at their No. 925 Greenwich Street town house in Manhattan.”
Palatial photo dump
Early spring in Chicago brings with it shifting winds that seem to wipe clean the air above the city. The salt dust, fuel-oil soot, marine fog, and low-angle sunlight that conspire to create the gray (or, at night, orange) pallor of winter all drop away. Warmer sunlight and battling lake and prairie winds make for some crisp, severe-clear days that are perfect for photos — before the humidity and smog of summer drop their veil of haze. That’s all to say: I’ve uploaded quite a few springtime-around-town photos to Flickr — from the leviathan Industrial Gothic lofts of the Central Manufacturing District to elegant Graceland Cemetery, with forsythias and willows in their pale beauty.
I’ve also uploaded a few photos from months past, including shots from Philadelphia (e.g., 30th St. Station, as above) and Boston and a few events here (like the Anti-Auto Show).
Subsidies side by side
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?
west north 