Hyde Park Urbanist

UofC Med Center Swine Flu

TribWGN:

Of five probable cases of swine flu announced found in Chicago so far, two of the probable cases are employees of the University of Chicago Medical Center, center spokesman John Easton said late Wednesday.

Both victims are at home and recovering well, he said. During the time they were contagious, they had no patient contact and limited contact with hospital staff.

Listen, it's probably no fault of the Medical Center or their employees if the swine flu gets passed around there, but I'm rather skeptical of this statement.  Let's make a couple assumptions that put this contention in its best light.  Let's assume the employees are technicians, people who are not customer-facing.  And let's assume the UofC Med Center can pinpoint the exact times these employees were contagious and what the employees were doing at those times.

The employees didn't ride the elevators or eat at the cafeteria?

(Update: the portion above in bold has now been sent verbatim to the University community as part of an e-mail from University Vice-Presidents Kimberly Goff-Crews and Nim Chinniah.)

IIT

My racquetball buddy Waiel asked me to accompany him to a play on Friday night.  His nephew goes to IIT and does college theater, so we saw Mousetrap.  Believe it or not, I hadn't gotten over to IIT before and it was real joy on that pleasant Friday night to wander around the campus after eating a huge sandwich at Ricobene.

The IIT campus has the feel of an engineering school, but one where the engineers have a bit of cheerful style.  Above left is the brightly-colored student center, with the L tracks running along the roof.  Excellent pedestrian crossing there.  The former Armour Institute is one of the few old buildings on campus.

Pic-left gives a better angle of the L tracks heading into the semi-tube atop the student center roof.  The tube's open at the top, so the noise goes up instead of down into the building.  You can hear the trains passing overhead, but it's not loud or annoying.  The architect did a fine job of turning a problem into an amenity.

Waiel took a turn posing at a red sculpture.  And, we had a chance to chat with his nephew after the play.  It seems like IIT students feel much closer to downtown and points north; he talked about going to the Loop a lot.  That's the Green Line passing over the student center roof and the Red Line is a short walk away, over by Comiskey.  Rail transit has a way of making locations seems closer together.

Central Area Action Plan

This is huge(.pdf).  It's a $15 billion wish list from the Chicago Department of Transportation, 90% of which is transit related.  All the projects are close to the Loop-- there's nothing located in our neighborhoods-- but this represents a grand scheme, a master plan for downtown transit improvements.  None of it's funded yet, but the Mayor's people are dangling this out as a plum, a byproduct of the Olympics, possibly, that the Feds and State would help the City pay for.

The big projects are a Clinton Street Subway ($3billion) and a West Loop Transportation Center at Clinton & Adams ($2billion).  An east-west subterranean bus or rail transitway under Monroe street comes is priced at a relatively modest $200million.  You'll note that these projects are all more expensive than the Gold Line and that the Monroe transitway might be added to the Gold Line so that the South Chicago Metra line turns left at Monroe and crosses the Red Line & Blue Line, ending near Union Station.  Those are very exciting possibilities.

The Department of Transportation should be commended for seeing their job as including transit & walking.  A couple relatively inexpensive pieces of this are pedestrian bridges for Streeterville and the West Loop (at Monroe).

The Loop has outgrown its old boundaries.  There's an expanding market for urban living and this plan reflects the importance of the  Near North, the West Loop and the South Loop to the future of Chicago.  All very exciting.  All deserving of our support.

Specter Switches Parties

I have a backlog of transit and urbanist stuff waiting for my attention, but tree allergies have been killing me the last three days.  This is the worst I've had allergies since moving to Chicago.

For now, let me quickly say that I hope the Democrats in Pennsylvania find someone to challenge Arlen Specter for the Senate nomination.  Specter was against Hillary-care, was useless on torture and has flip-flopped on card check legislation.  Suddenly, when he has no chance of winning a Republican primary in Pennsylvania, his "conscience" leads him to switching parties.  The Democrats in Senate should use him as they see fit and hopefully Democrats in Pennsylvania will do their duty come primary day.

If you'll forgive the mixing of metaphors with the pic, let me suggest a campaign song for Specter's Democratic challenger: "Return to Sender/ address unknown/ no such number/ no such zone."  When in doubt-- not that I ever am-- Elvis delivers.

Swine Flu

I'd urge people to take this seriously.  Don't let it run your life or anything, but you should prepare a bit, namely by imagining what you'd need-- not desire, but need-- if the stores were closed for a couple weeks.  Bulk up a bit on canned food, including pet food, as well as essential paper goods.  Don't go nuts or anything, but buy a few extra cans of soup, stuff like that.

The scariest things about this swine flu outbreak so far is that there are reports that the cases in Mexico seemed to concentrate on people aged 28-55.  If that's true, and we don't know for sure yet, then this could be like the Spanish flu of 1918 that overstimulated the immune system and was as dangerous for healthy, young people as it was for infants and the elderly.

We're Trying to Live Principled Lives Here

Maybe nostalgia is clouding my mind a bit, but in my youth I think the loyal opposition were actually trying to live principled lives.  They were often good role models, even if we on the left disagreed about this & that.  Back when we had to walk miles thru the snow to school and home again, uphill both ways, conservatives stood foresquare against moral relativism.  These days, even when they get it right, they pull their punches. 

Consider this piece by Maggie Gallagher at National Review Online (via Andrew Sullivan):

I personally believe torture is wrong. We shouldn't do it. Even if it means me, my husband, and my two sons get blown up. Seriously, if I had to choose I'd say: Death is common to us all; torture is a choice.

Right, because torture is like stealing and bearing false witness.  It's wrong even if you get away with it, even if your loved ones benefit from it.  Stealing and torturing and lying are all signs of bad character, of moral weakness and we should try to live lives consistent with our principles.  We should try to live by the standards we believe the Almighty has set.

Is torture used to find the truth?  Far more often, torture is used as an instrument to create forged proof for what the authorities want to have people believe.  It's no surprise that the Bush Administration turned to torture because they wanted to fabricate a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

If the subject of the conversation is national policy, it doesn't matter whether torture works.  Nor does it matter if our enemies are covered by the Geneva Convention, just like it's wrong to steal from & lie to people different from us.  It's not about them; it's about us.  It's about what changes in us when we lie and steal and torture.

The torture apologists indulge in one moral relativism argument after another.  "It works."  "It's ok against these enemies."  And now Maggie Gallagher takes cover with the equivalent of "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is":

What is the meaning of the word, torture? Is it consent that makes the difference between inflicting pain for science and torture? Is it the motivation of the person inflicting suffering? Or is inflicting pain on humans to extract information always wrong? Or is it only wrong when the person can't get up and walk away if he or she wants? Is it a question of how much pain or deprivation?

Sadly, we need to know. I don't.

Listen, lying and stealing have gray areas, too.  Are conservatives going to claim that they don't know what those words mean, either?  The Bush Administration ok'd as policy "enhanced interrogation techniques", like waterboarding, that we've considered to be torture for decades.

In my heart of hearts, I worry that the moral relativism of today's American political right will end up dragging the rest of us down with it-- that their example will soon be used as an excuse for the left to perpetrate untold evils, too.  The loyal opposition has a duty to critique those currently in power.  Principles have to inform those critiques.  Never in my lifetime have I witnessed such widespread dereliction of duty.  

Charms to Sooth a Savage Breast

I hear people around me speaking Spanish a fair bit, but I don't think they have much of a sense of humor.  Oh, sometimes I see Spanish-speakers laughing at something someone else has said in Spanish, but the jokes never make me laugh.  Of course, I don't really speak Spanish, but I feel better about myself if I go on believing that I speak & understand a more humorous language.

Do animals have a sense of humor?  Do they make audible jokes?  If we can't tell when an animal is laughing, that would make it all the more difficult to know for sure, don't you think?  Would it be anthropomorphism to simply assume that animals, especially the primates most closely related to us, do have a sense of humor?  I'd argue that it's obvious we & animals have fairly common emotional make-ups-- in the same way we share almost all of our genetic make-up-- so just assuming that animals can't make jokes is anthropodenial, that insistence on a bright dividing line between us and other species.

I'm making my way thru the second disk of David Attenborough's BBC series "Attenborough in Paradise and Other Personal Voyages".  The episode "The Song of the Earth" examines the use of music by animals and compares it to how humans use music.  Of course, territory & status figure prominently as motivators.  Male birds use song to project virility and attract mates.  Do human males ever, say, join bands to impress chicks?  Of such things, I've heard tell.

Gropius Buildings at Reese

The Reader's Best of Chicago 2009 list included, as far as I can tell, exactly one southside attraction*-- Best Endangered Building.  Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius's Michael Reese buildings received this bittersweet award.  In this week's Reader, Lynn Becker is publishing a very strong article, concerned not only with the immense loss of buildings designed by this architectural giant, but also the environmental insensitivity inherent in this destruction.

As reported in this week's Herald, the Southside Preservation Action Fund is helping fight this.  SPAF, under the umbrella of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference (where I'm on the board, chairing the transit committee), has been nurtured along by Jack Spicer.  SPAF has already contributed a small amount toward research of Gropius's work and several SPAF board members are helping organize the political fight.  Olympics 2016 is helping drive this destruction since the Olympic Village is supposed to be sited on the Michael Reese parcel.

Hyde Park Progress yesterday joined in the call for preservation and C-Pop's article makes many fine points and we're grateful for the good-natured congratulations he extends to Jack Spicer and the HPKCC for our efforts.  (Hah!  Just kidding about that congratulations part.)

(Photo by David Schalliol.  See the Preservation Chicago site.)

*C'mon, guys.  The Chicago Diner has better vegetarian food than Soul Vegetarian?  No way, dudes.

Famous People & Urban Renewal

Some of my Facebook friends have been playing with an app where you choose 5 famous people you've met.  That got me thinking.  "Met" is a bit fuzzy.  Could use a stronger definition.  Let's say you have to interact with the famous person-- they had to know you were there and acknowledge your presence.

Like many Hyde Parkers, I've met maybe the two most famous people in the world right now-- Barack & Michelle Obama.  I ran into them separately, helping Michelle with a simple computer issue when she worked at the University and lobbying Barack on what's now called the Gold Line back when he was a state senator running for U.S. Senator. 

While working at Borders in Philadelphia, I once retrieved a book for the writer David Halberstam.  It was one of his own books.  I think he was going on a radio program and had forgotten to bring a copy, something like that.  The guy who put the book on hold had spelled his name "Halberstand".

My ex-boyfriend had a nose for the rich & famous.  He could walk into a room and instantly sense who the most powerful person there was.  Thru him, I once had lunch with the baseball catcher Benito Santiago and dinner with singer Shirley Horne.

That's five right there and it seems like I'm forgetting somebody.  In any case, the urban planner Edmund Bacon has to make the list.  As with Halberstam, I once retrieved a book for him at Borders and, again, it was his own book, Design of Cities.  Remembering that got me thinking about how Bacon handled urban renewal in Philly.

I think you could argue that Bacon's Philadelphia employed urban renewal as well as any city.  Lucky for all concerned, a crosstown freeway that he wanted to build aroused enough opposition to kill it.  He oversaw the construction of a couple expressways but I remember them being sited fairly well. 

The best of Bacon's many achievements have a strong alternative transportation component.  There are actually pedestrian-only paths in Society Hill.  Market East is a mall built above a perfect storm of rail transit options.  Penn Center replaced an obstruction with high rises and the Center City Commuter Connection is what the Chicago pedestrian expressway between State Street and Randolph Station aspires to be.

Choosing him as a connection to famous people has an added bonus, of course.  His son did ok as an actor, so meeting this urban planner means I'm two degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

Rural & Urban

The glaciers stopped just south of Carbondale and that's where the rolling hills of Illinois begin.  This pic is just outside of Alto Pass.

The purpose of my 5-day trip last week, besides just getting away for a bit, was to visit my friend Nathan, who's bought 10 acres of land for a permaculture farm.  Toward that end, we pruned grape leaves, picked dandelions for wine and began trying to identify the trees on his property.

The pace of life is noticeably slower in these small towns in southern Illinois.  When the Alto Pass library says it'll be open Saturdays from 9-3, that's a goal, not a promise.  Ditto the famous Root Beer Saloon.  The European-Americans who settled this region mostly arrived from Kentucky & Tennessee, so this is really a peripheral area of the south, culturally-speaking.  And the land features have more in common with the southern Uplands than the prairie to the north which is so suitable for factory farming.  With Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and these picturesque hillsides, the area has attracted all manner of hippies & other oddballs.  I felt very comfortable and had a great time with Nathan & his newfound friends.

On Sunday at 5:15pm, I caught the Amtrak Saluki back to Chicago and arrived at Union Station a few minutes earlier than scheduled, about 330 miles in five and a half hours.  The train was crowded, but at least on a train you can walk around a bit.  I camped out in the club car and wasted time playing a computer game on my laptop.

Even with America's rail transit deficiencies, Union Station is still one of greatest rail passenger centers in the world.  Walking east on Adams, a couple blocks later I passed the Sears Tower rising up into the fog and then another block later the Loop, a transit structure so important that the word's used in Chicago more often than "downtown" to describe our central business district.  Three blocks further east, I walked above the Dearborn subway and another block after that the State Street subway.  And the bus stop for my #6 is on State Street, too.  One #6 passed by me as I was nearing State but another arrived just 15 minutes later, even though it was 11pm on a Sunday.

That's a lot of city in the half mile along Adams from Union Station to State Street.  With the internet, I'd be happy enough living among like-minded people in southern Illinois, especially the Cardinals fans.  That's gorgeous country down there, as pleasing to the eye as skyscrapers & Lake Michigan.  But I'd have to drive everywhere.