The next level of fake places

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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

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Palatial

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

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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?

The real city

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“If history teaches us anything, it should be an area currently inhabited, and eventually abandoned, by the wealthy.”

sure, because those are the neighborhoods with great old buildings to fix up. of course, the fact that Williamsburg is a shithole devoid of any architectural interest didn’t keep the hipsters out of there, but that goes to show just how desperate New Yorkers are.

WP will never quite be Lincoln Park, as they’re morphologically different: the density isn’t nearly as high, the housing stock has none of those tiny lakefront studios, and there’s more nonprofit-owned, permanent subsidized housing on the side streets.

to anyone who says “it’s so fake”: so, what’s real? the suburbs are a fantasy of country-manor life: every man has his castle, etc. Lincoln Park is a fantasy of fraternity life with more booze and money. Hyde Park is an ivory-tower fantasy. okay, maybe North Lawndale or Englewood are keeping it real, but most of their residents would probably trade reality for fantasy if it made their neighborhood safer. etc.

[posted @ Chicagoist]

Gentrification apace

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Crain’s has had an odd number of articles on neighborhood retail in recent months, capped (it would seem) by a feature by Sandra Jones on the chain invasion now in progress:

The foray has already begun, with lesser-known chain stores opening on Milwaukee Avenue. Urban Outfitters, the 73-store clothing chain aimed at twentysomething metropolitan hipsters, plans to set up shop on Milwaukee this summer � just down the street from American Apparel, the rapidly expanding Los Angeles-based fashionable T-shirt chain that bowed in November. Dutch jeans boutique G-Star Denim and New York’s funky apparel store Scoop, both small but growing chains, also plan to open stores on Milwaukee later this year…

Urban Outfitters has been looking for a site in Wicker Park and Bucktown for the past four years, says Tedford Marlow, president of the Philadelphia chain, whose parent also owns Anthropologie.

Well, there goes the neighborhood. (Again.) I’m a bit surprised about Gap or J. Crew, since they’re both serving the neighborhood just fine from locations just across the river. Gap even closed two locations in Lincoln Park (Armitage/Halsted and Clark/Fullerton) to shift over to North/Sheffield.

Update 2 May: stumbled across Scoop in the Meatpacking District last week and, well, ugh: it’s like Barney’s Co-op, down to the holier-than-thou staff, lack of inventory, and $300 sun dresses.

Also, the best line from “Prairie Home Companion” yesterday:
“I suffer from an addiction to cheese, as a result of which I must maintain a cheese-free home and avoid any contact with those who have eaten cheese in the past three weeks. This has made for a lonely life…”

CTA’s pitch backfiring?

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Apparently, few are heeding Barbara Brotman’s call to recognize that CTA overall does a pretty good job: “Come on, people: We all have our beefs. But Chicago’s buses, subways and “L”s are a great urban amenity that lets us live in, work in and enjoy Chicago in ways that define the city. And with the CTA proposing major cuts unless the state fills its $55 million budget deficit, it’s a good time to say so.”

Over half the respondents to a Crain’s online poll today say they’d blame CTA, not Daley, Blago, the Assembly, or the feds, if the doomsday cuts occur. This despite $200 million in annual cost savings already achieved at CTA–while the state gives not a penny, RTA sales tax revenues have been shrinking by $10M a year (real dollars), the city give the same $3 million it gave in 1983 (“disgraceful,” says Ald. Preckwinkle), and the feds have pulled back on roughly $30 million a year in operating assistance while imposing immensely costly (almost $100M a year) unfunded mandates through ADA, security, et al.

I’m getting increasingly frustrated with people, especially the disabled “activists” or the anarchists at the various budget hearings, laying into CTA and screaming about waste while demanding even bigger handouts. Okay, people, if you’re so smart, why don’t you go and find the waste? Let’s have a constructive discussion here, instead of screaming about blame.

Meanwhile, DJW is echoing what Greg Hinz from Crain’s has hinted at: a CTA bailout may involve a state takeover of paratransit, perhaps with some merger with Pace’s paratransit operations and squeezing Medicaid dollars to pick up the cost of some rides. (This makes eminent sense: Pace runs a tighter paratransit ship, splitting city & suburban paratransit is silly, and human services should be funded through human services funds, not mass transit funds.)

However, the timetable for a grand overhaul of the funding formula has been pushed to 2006. A few notable things should happen by then: first, Pace’s finances will probably be in an equally tight spot, bringing service cuts to the suburbs. (Pace is already engaged in some creative accounting to balance its budget.) Second, perhaps suburban Cook legislators will understand that dumping the formula is more in their interest than standing behind Metra’s city-bashing scare tactics. Third, maybe there’s time to continue to build support within the business community, which unfortunately (despite some noises from MPC and Metropolis) hasn’t realized that transit is vital to the economic fortunes of Chicago and Illinois. Indeed, a recent Crain’s article by Gregory Meyer makes it seem as if the Chamber of Commerce is a bit indifferent about service cuts that would absolutely eviscerate services (especially in the mid-north/Old Town and Evanston) for the countless corporate drones living along the north lakefront:

[Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce president & CEO Jerry Roper is] willing to accept higher fares and longer commute times rather than a tax-related stop-gap measure that fails to address the region�s transit funding problems.

“Businesses can vote with their feet,” Mr. Roper said. “At the end of the day, if in fact businesses get upset enough where they�re opposed to this, they can start thinking about relocating. Then those employees don�t have to worry to worry about a CTA fare hike � they don�t have a job any longer.”

Roper and other business leaders believe the solution to the CTA�s crisis lies in fixing the complex funding formula that divides up tax revenue among the CTA, Metra rail and the Pace suburban bus service.

Business leaders say there�s no question the CTA�s slate of cuts would harm firms, raising employee costs and hampering productivity…

Worse transit service could also prompt more commuting by car, slowing down goods movement, Mr. Roper said.

Less frequent service and cancelled routes � including rush-hour express buses from Union Station and the Ogilvie Transportation Center and Purple Line Express el service � could in the long term even make commercial tenants think twice about locating in the city…

Supporters of longer-ranging reform must first overcome mistrust from suburban leaders who view transit funding as a zero-sum game. That may not happen this legislative session.

Measure 37: planning failed to engage imaginations

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Daniel Brook’s article on Measure 37 in the current Legal Affairs attributes the measure’s passage (and the cracking of the long-standing consensus in favor of planning) as a failure of imagination. Unlike Tom McCall, who spoke poetically on behalf of how the state’s beauty — both rural and urban — were in serious decline, opponents failed to demonstrate how the state’s planning regime was at risk, and how that planning regime has helped the state make monumental strides in everyday individuals’ collective and personal quality of life.

Yet rather than trying to draw the connection by showing voters what Oregon might look like without smart growth, the measure’s opponents let its backers define the terms of debate. The tagline of one anti-37 ad I saw wasn’t much of a rallying cry: “No on 37: Arbitrary, Unfair, Costly.” […]

OIA’S campaign didn’t succesed because of an appeal to self-interest alone, however. It was aided by complacency. OIA polling found that 54 percent of Oregonians who had had a run-in with the state’s planning system rated the experience poor or worse. Yet the same poll estimated that less than half of the state’s residents had ever had a run-in with planners at all, whether positive or negative. OIA’s campaign relied on the outrage and self-interest of those who felt they’d been burned by the system, but it also relied on those who had used a superior transit system, breathed cleaner air, or picnicked in a park without crediting the system that protected those benefits of living in Oregon.

The real genius of OIA’s campaign was in its having convinced voters who might otherwise have been disinclined to dismantle their state’s planning system that a vote for 37 was a vote to safeguard rights, not curtail them.

The rights being curtailed, of course, are the public’s right to livable, beautiful spaces. Yes, in fact, that is social engineering of sort, but sprawl is just as socially engineered as any other alternative growth mechanism. The foolish cry of “it’s my land, I can do what I want with it” is absolutely maddening in this context.

It was the fear of a paradise paved that mobilized Oregonians to undertake their experiment in smart growth in the first place. As Metro Council President Bragdon told me, in the 1970s “people saw a reason to act. Population was growing, the air was getting dirtier, downtown Portland was dying, there was disinvestment. And all of that sort of activated people in a way they ordinarily would not be activated around something as arcane and abstract as land use planning. At least for that brief period, people saw the relevance of it and the importance of it.” [emphasis added]

Parting glance

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The Trib has a story on Brian Palm, a photographer who’s volunteered to take photos of buildings that get put on the depressingly long Demolition Delay List. Among other sites, Palm snapped a photo of the old St. Boniface school before it went:

At any point in the 15 years since that was abandoned, the archdiocese could have sold that building (with its arches, high ceilings, and huge south facing windows) to a loft converter for millions. Instead, they let it decay and eventually condemned it, a fate that will likely befall the church as well.

Other pictured buildings include many single-family cottages in fast-gentrifying Lakeview or Bucktown, one handsome three-flat in Lincoln Park, and a neat flats-above-shops across from McCormick Place.

I suppose that the advantage that demolition delay has conferred upon us is that we can at least rush out to see what’s about to be lost before it is. Maybe someone will be adventurous enough to rip out some nice detailing from a condemned building.

(There are some misleading bits on Palm’s site, though; for instance, the First Unitarian Church on Woodlawn in Hyde Park was not demolished, but did lose the copper spire. Sometimes, the text at the demo-delay site isn’t all that clear on those details.)

Awards for Chinatown

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Evidently, I’m not the only one who thinks that recent developments in Chinatown are well worth noting. The neighborhood has racked up five of the 24 Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Architectural Excellence in Community Design awards (given in conjunction with LISC’s Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards) given since 1998. Even more surprisingly, all five are within two blocks of one another.

A list of the awards given, by neighborhood:
Beverly: Beverly Arts Center
Bronzeville: Komed Holman Health Center
Chinatown: Archer Courts Townhouses, CASL Kam Liu Building, Archer Courts Rehabilitation, Ping Tom Memorial Park, CASL Senior Housing
Englewood: Southwest Women Working Together
Galewood Park & Norwood Park: Mather Caf�
Garfield Park: Garfield Market, Rebecca Johnson Apts/Deborah’s Place
Goose Island: Republic Windows & Doors
Humboldt Park: Humboldt Ridge Apartments
Hyde Park: Willard Square Apartments
Lakeview: The Belray Apartments
Lawndale: Homan Square Community Center, Jubilee (Carole Robertson) Family Resource Center
Little Village: Little Village Family Resource Center, Little Village Academy
Midway: Midway Head Start Center
Roseland: Roseland Ridge Apartments
South Shore: Jackson Park/63rd Street Beach Pavilion
Washington Park: Children’s Place at Vision House

For what it’s worth, this is a really cool group of buildings: of the 18 award winners that I’ve seen, most have been noteworthy buildings well deserving of a closer look even outside of the often completely unexpected context. Some of them, like 63rd Street Beach, Ping Tom Park, and Roseland Ridge, rank among the best places in the city.

This category of deserving buildings often gets left out of the usual award ceremonies, possibly because of the high entry fees associated or the onerous submission requirements — forms that architects can fill out, but that community developers are usually too busy to think much of. (I’m surprised that transportation projects seem to have been overlooked; then again, very few really groundbreaking transport facilities have been done locally outside of downtown. The Douglas rehab, maybe, but it’s somewhat programmatic.)

Incidentally, this came to mind today when I poked around the Archer Courts complex post-occupancy; I hadn’t walked around since construction was finishing up on the townhouses. Sure enough, folks were strolling around outside the high-rises and kids were talking quietly in the walkways between the townhouses, which warmly reflected the sunlight into the narrow spaces. Even on paper, it sounds cool: almost 60 dua gross, a mix from very low income to moderate-high income, about 50% Black and 50% Chinese with families and seniors, Modernist styling with prefab components, no demolition. On the ground, it actually works.

Skipping a generation

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I picked up a carton of Organic Valley soymilk at Whole Foods the other day; it was new and I’m a sucker for their products, since I know it’s at least local to the Upper Midwest (and their cultured butter is so darn good). The side panel invited me to enter details about my carton into their web site, which promised details about the farmers who grew the beans which made my soymilk. Of course, I can’t resist wanting to know more about my farmers, especially if it proves that we’re only a few hundred miles apart, and especially if they’re organically farming soy (which my family knows a bit about).

Sure enough, there they were: three sturdy Iowans. Farmer Erwin Henderson’s bio mentions that he’s doing what his grandfather did by farming the family land organically. It’s odd to think that in one generation, the business of farming (as with everything else, really) has been turned upside down by the “green revolution” or by the Oil Age in some other manifestation, and that we’re just now trying to turn it all back.

New CSA in town

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Just signed up for two weeks’ worth of produce from the Rainbow Farmers Co-op. Rainbow is a project of Growing Power, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit that seems to have its fingers in a lot of pots: urban gardening in Milwaukee and Chicago (here in conjunction with Gallery 37), a cooperative of small farms in southern Wisconsin, food-security programs in both inner cities, etc.

Anyhow, what’s cool about it:
– choices: all- or partially-organic, a half-share size at half price, and meat’s available upon request
– year-round: local produce in the summer, less local stuff in the winter
– variety: produce comes from many small farms, instead of one; includes vegetables, fruit, and other things (honey and eggs, for instance)
– small, flexible commitment: just drop off a check by the Monday prior and you’re good for that week
– competitively priced: $26 for a large organic box, $7 for a half-sized partially-organic box

The pickup location is Blackwater Caf�, a small operation inside the Acme Artists Lofts co-op a few blocks away. Right now, there’s not much local inside the box: basically, the earth around here is yielding nothing but some very early perennial herbs right now. (I can get sorrel and sage from the garden, and only a snippet of either.) Hopefully, that will change within a few weeks as the first spring greens show up.