Hyde Park Urbanist

Street Sweeping Schedule

A couple good neighbors passed along the website to go to if you want to know when the city will be sweeping the streets on your block.  (Edited to the page for all wards.)

It's March in Chicago, People

I'm stealing another photo from Avi Schwab's twitter feed because why should I go out in the cold when Avi can do this from his window?

Guys and gals, this happens just about every year.  Sometime during March, we'll get a good-sized snowfall.  Oh, it's always noticeably warmer in March, but the warm days are windy and wet.  And those warm days alternate with cold & breezy.  March is the month in Chicago when tempers flare and folks swear they'll leave.  Fine, then, go!  And take your cars with you, please, so I won't have to listen to all the griping about paying more for your metered, but still subsidized, street parking.

I stayed in all weekend playing my baseball computer game.  Just when I thought this obsession was waning, bad weather and a new league setup got me going again.  And it's not like I don't have plenty of other projects to work on.  Oh, I did get thru a little more of my Netflix queue and brought friends down from the north side to stimulate Hyde Park's retail economy thru used-book purchasing, but otherwise the weather was a perfect excuse for my favorite waste of time.

A Warning for Parents

(Via Ezra Klein) Parents, if your kids take the wrong path, you won't be able to blame Kung Fu Monkey:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Bus Bunching

I'm still against bus bunching...  YoChicago reports that construction unions are considering investing pension fund money in the Spire to get the huge project jump-started...  73-year-old immigrant from South Korea Ki Han is my kind of everyday hero, standing up to loiterers in his laundromat even after a thug threw a microwave on top of him...  The Blue Gargoyle opened a thrift store at their 5438 Woodlawn Avenue location, to be open short hours Friday, Saturday and Sunday...  The Weird Chicago Tours Blog has been posting about prohibition gangsters...  (Via Market Urbanism), Where has published a list of urbanism "books for curious novices" and both the list and the books on it are worth a read...  I asked my friend Sam if he could shed any light on the velvet-covered rooms at the Del Prado and he told me that when he read the Herald article, he said to himself, "Why didn't I know about those?"

John Hope Franklin (1915-2009)

John Hope Franklin died this morning of congestive heart failure.  Author of From Slavery to Freedom, as well as countless other books & articles, Franklin is one of the most important historians of overlapping subjects: African-Americans and the American South.  In 1964, the University of Chicago recruited him to be a Professor of History and he chaired the department from 1967-70.

Franklin's achievements are numerous & vital, but I'd like to mention that he was married to the same woman for 59 years.  It's hard to make the argument that a 94-year-old man was taken from us too soon, but into his nineties Franklin was still going strong.  Rest in peace, Dr. Franklin.  America owes you so much...

Urban-planning the Campus

Last week, I mentioned that University Architect Steve Wiesenthal wanted to make the Quad more walkable (and I basically argued that we don't have a Quad, but rather a traffic circle with lots of grass around it).  I'd like to return to his remarks as reported in the Maroon here, specifically this passage:

Containing more of a general vision than specific commitments, much of Wiesenthal’s plan focused on integrating what he called the inward nature of the quadrangles and main campus facilities with the exterior neighborhood environment. To this end, Wiesenthal repeatedly stressed the importance of developing the Midway and South Ellis Avenue into welcoming locations rather than intra-campus barriers.

“Ellis Avenue should become our main street,” Wiesenthal said. He referred to South Ellis Avenue as an inadequate gateway into one of the world’s great universities, and suggested that the street should serve as a “meeting ground rather than a dividing line” between the hospital and science facilities on one side and the liberal arts divisions on the other. Wiesenthal brought up the possibility of a freestanding cafe in the plaza across from the administration building that could bring more foot traffic and activity to the street.

I don't want to make too much of a small portion of his remarks, especially since I didn't attend this event.  But let's assume this resembles what he meant to say.

I'm happy anytime the University considers their "Main Street" to be something closer than 53rd Street.  His goal of drawing University and Hospital folks together on Ellis will be, at worst, harmless.  At best, it might lead to what really needs to happen-- creating areas on campus that welcome people from the neighborhoods.  If we had spots on (or near) campus that attracted outsiders, University and Hospital staff would tend to congregate there.

Wiesenthal seems to be promoting Ellis as a north-south gateway into campus.  The immediate question that leaps to mind is where are the people who would enjoy this gateway coming from?  The Midway and points south?  55th Street?  Thing is, drivers and walkers are approaching campus from all directions.  How do you design a gateway for them?

Ah, but transit has something to offer here.  Buses drop folks off all around the perimeter of campus, but trains are different.  Hordes of employees use the 57th Street Metra station as their gateway to campus, walking along 57th Street toward Reynolds Club and then destinations in all directions.  And really, 57th Street makes a darned nice gateway IMO.  I look forward to the Gold Line unloading even more people at 57th-- all day and evening.

And let me make a plea for a greater role for the Fountain of Time pictured at the top of this article.  That's a wonderful gateway for people arriving from the west and south.

Obamamania, but it's not Hyde Park

Pic-left is a street in Toronto.  That's in Canada.

Two businesses- a cafe and a computer store-- in the same block have recently named themselves after our beloved president.  This led to charges and counter-charges, but, in the spirit of Obamamania, a compromise of sorts was reached.  Wooooo!  Somehow, it helped that both business owners were from Eritrea-- that's in Africa.  

The tech store will be changing its name.  Might I suggest "Barack Cybernet Ltd."?  (Hat tip: Chicagoist)

Allergies & Metra

I think it's allergies.  Something's making me feel irritable & tired and my eyes are itchy.  Pollen.com says the predominant pollens in this zip code are cedar, elm and juniper and I somehow developed cedarfever the last time I lived in Austin.  A lot of rain would be helpful, please...

The Tribune's a mess this morning, with a thoughtful article on how Metra is behind the times because it won't take credit cards.  Fair enough.  But in the haste to paint Metra as "bad" they also featured an accompanying photo series with the headline "Unfriendly Metra".  Problem is, the photos make Metra look anything but unfriendly; it features smiling conductors.  Excuse me if I'm being unduly irritable here, but that just seems idiotic.

Beating a Dead Horse

It's been a little tough to find things to write about lately.  Oh, I could be linking to CTA Tattler to tell you that the #55 buses will be more express and less local or to ChiTown Daily News for a report that the Circle Line got congressional funding for some planning.  But Matthew Yglesias has been concentrating on the financial catastrophe instead of urbanism.  Nothing's really pissing me off these days.  Besides closing down my dental clinic, I can't think of anything to gripe about the University, either.  Luckily, Hyde Park Progress rides to the rescue.

Today, HPP decided to break the news that the defunct Co-op grocery story had serious problems before its members voted to close it.  Shocking, eh?  As a board member, I can assure you that the negative reviews they found on Yelp represent a tiny fraction of the very legitimate customer complaints I read & heard.  (Not that there weren't some excellent employees making do with their outdated equipment.)

And the renovations at Treasure Island have produced a contemporary-looking retail operation.  The shelves are stocked and the store is clean.  Management has been very supportive of the community and I can personally attest that they were extremely helpful with last year's Hyde Park Book Sale.

However, it's a little silly to compare the Co-op's worst ten years with Treasure Island's first two years.  Sure, TI has spent money on capital improvements that the Co-op would not have been able to afford in the foreseeable future.  But what do you think TI will look like after 20 years? 

Will they even be there?  Will the family that owns it someday decide to sell to a larger chain?  I once worked at a grocery store in the very successful HEB chain in Texas that closed not because it failed to make money or make customers happy, but because the size of the store didn't fit the image they wanted to project-- a situation very similar to the dental clinic I mentioned above.  Because it was a cooperative, the Co-op was immune to some of these scenarios, a reason it was able to survive for 75 years as a going concern, which was fairly remarkable.

Yelper Andrew C gets to the heart of the matter:

The co-op only survives because it has a monopoly on groceries in a neighborhood with high population density and low car ownership. I feel like a chump whenever I shop there, but until Hyde Park Produce opens at 53rd and Kimbark, I have no other choice.

Yeah, the Co-op's decision in the late nineties to buy the former Mr. G's AND build a new store on 47th Street monopolized the grocery sector in Hyde Park.  When losses at 47th Street impinged on the very profitable operations at 55th Street, quality went downhill fast.  And even if the Co-op's three stores had been great, people still would have been dissatisfied because we like to have choices.  The Co-op's efforts to monopolize were unforgivable.

On the other hand, having the University pick retail for the neighborhood is only one step removed from that sort of monopolization.  Hyde Park Produce and Treasure Island are too similar for my tastes and my observation is that there's a segment of customers which shopped at the Co-op but go to neither of those stores.  The customer base for TI has definitely improved over the first few months when it was obvious their sales were less than the Co-op's had been.  But even after the renovations, I'd guess their sales figures are still within 10% of the Co-op's one way or the other.  The replacement of the Co-op with TI has barely changed Hyde Park's retail trade deficit (the retail dollars we spend elsewhere versus the dollars spent here by others).  Maybe fewer HPers are heading to Roosevelt Road, but, if so, I believe that's balanced out by those who've quit shopping in our neighborhood.

My advice is the same now as it was during the Co-op election.  The University should build another grocery store in Hyde Park because no one else controls so much land.  Until the University does that, it'll just be a more upscale version of the monopolization problem we had before.

Ideological Strait Jackets

Sorry that I've been off-topic so much.  I have a couple things concerning what's supposed to be my weekday-topics-- Hyde Park and urbanism-- but I've been kinda busy both at work and home.  The topics on my mind will take a little more research & energy than I've been able to give them.  OTOH, this set me off:

Megan McArdle:

Barney Frank, however, uses the bonuses to make an important point:  the compensation structure at all of these firms is seriously screwed up.  Bonuses originally intended to encourage performance have morphed into deferred guaranteed compensation, for reasons that aren't clear.   That's not necessarily a huge issue--except now, when the time-shifting leads to moral outrage.  But the really pernicious problem is that the contracts are set up so that bonuses cannot be substantially cut if profits fall. 

It's not clear to me how contracts have come to be written that way--after all, they weren't always handing out taxpayer money, and the big bosses who wrote those contracts were also sizeable shareholders in their firms.  The result, however, is that all of the employees holding these sorts of contracts have vastly excessive incentives for risk taking.  Perhaps some of them were taking big risks on the moral hazard of having Congress bail them out--but as Lehman shows, that was never a slam dunk.

The only reason McArdle is baffled by "how contracts have come to be written that way" is that she's blinding herself to the simple fact that executives are more motivated to look after their own personal interests than the interests of the corporations they run.  Or, more accurately perhaps, McArdle refuses to consider the Marxist perspective.  These executives are more class conscious than the janitors who clean their offices.  By decreasing the downsides of risk for other executives, they were making it standard operating procedure to protect all executives, including themselves, from the dangers of capitalism.

A Marxist perspective-- and my politics are more Anarchist than Marxist-- also explains why the executives of companies who would benefit from a government-run single-payer health insurance system have never lobbied for it.  They're worried-- and probably right to worry-- that folks in their income categories would end up paying higher taxes personally for single-payer.

And it's no surprise to me that a 75-year-old very conservative Republican Senator from Iowa, speaking off the cuff, would put forth an initially satisfying method of curing this problem.  Unfortunately, once the bloodletting starts, it's hard to stop it.  Tort reform is what we need, but not the kind the Republicans are always talking about.  If stockholders were allowed to sue directors and executives personally for not protecting corporations from the moral hazards McArdle describes, this problem would likely be diminished in the future.

McArdle finishes her post thusly:

Frankly, Congress shouldn't need to intervene in these contracts; they're inexplicably stupid.  Shareholders, having been alerted to the problem, ought to be demanding a fix.  Of course, look who's managing a lot of that shareholder money.  Honor among thieves?

Geez, what has to happen before McArdle will get to the point where she would have ended that paragraph with a period instead of a question mark?