Hyde Park Urbanist

Identical Twins

Via Andrew Sullivan, 15 sets of identical twins form a human mirror on a New York City subway car.  Performance art from Improv Everywhere:

Improv and subways!  It could only be better if a baseball game broke out.

Cycling Health

Alan Durning at Grist looks at the physical risks of cycling and concludes that health improvements from cycling outweigh the injury risks.  Lots of interesting quotes, but I was surprised by this one:

Former University of Washington professor William Moritz conducted surveys a decade ago showing that more than 80 percent of bike wrecks -- generally the less serious ones -- involve cyclists falling or colliding with things other than a moving car or truck

A transportation expert who'd looked into told a crowd I was in that most bicycle-vehicle accidents involve the bike hitting the car or truck.  I imagine that the others-- when a car hits a bike-- are far more likely to be very serious.

Anyway, it's well worth a read.

Parking Lots

Parking lots are beautiful, aren't they?  Those many shades of asphalt.  The regularity of the parking space shapes.  Why do we not set aside a day of thanks for the person who invented straight white lines?  Oh, I suppose some commercial real estate developer somewhere might someday come up with a more aesthetically pleasing design for warehousing cars, but it's certainly beyond my imagination.

More of Eric Rogers's photos can be seen at chicago-focus and I thank him for making them available under a generous Creative Commons license.

Commute Times in Chicago

Chris Winters, who runs the Map Collection room at Regenstein, put together an interesting map.  It shows the average work commute time for folks working outside the home in the various Chicago census tracts, according to 2000 census data.  I don't know about you, but I've always found that commute time has a great impact on quality of life, so much so that I try to live ten minutes away.  Under 20 minutes is okay, but the south side, except for Hyde Park, probably averages twice that.

Of course, one of the problems is that there are few large employers on the south side-- the University and Midway Airport are probably the largest single-site employers.  CTA L lines are rarely a choice for getting from a south side residence to either the Univ or Midway.

Mattoon from Amtrak

The Generalissima rode Amtrak's Illini from Carbondale to Chicago and took photos en route.  The pic here, which I hope she doesn't mind me stealing, is of my old stamping grounds in Mattoon.  My parents-- of all the choices available-- decided that Mattoon would be a swell place to raise kids.  After a couple decades of urban therapy, I've almost gotten to the point where I could forgive them.

Oh, I remember watching the Bob Newhart show when I was a small boy and wanting very much to live in a high rise like he did.  I was about thirteen when my dad took me to see the movie The Sunshine Boys with George Burns and Walter Matthau; I knew I'd want a studio apartment like Matthau's some day.  Well, I've never lived in a high rise, but my place does look a little like Matthau's, only with shelves and shelves of books.

The Generalissima's photo of Mattoon is pretty much how I remember it, only greener and more promising, somehow.  I'm sure it's been a fine place to live for many people.  (My little sister liked it for some reason and the internet may make small town life less isolating.)  But I've been grateful to live in big cities for decades now and when people gripe about Hyde Park, I'm tempted to tell them all about Mattoon.

McMobil

The current rumor about the vacant site on 53rd near Kenwood is that the University wants to buy the property and build a dormitory there.  Sometimes you hear they want to build 8 stories high and sometimes you hear 12.  If the rumor is true-- and I can't verify it-- I'd probably be in favor of the proposal as long as there's retail space on the ground floor.  I'd prefer 8 stories and could understand opposition to 12, but a few things about this site make it a good choice to waive the current zoning regulations in favor of density.

First and foremost, the McMobil site (so named because a McDonald's used to sit next to the Mobil station) is on the north side of the street across from Nichols Park so shadows will not fall across 53rd Street.  Since the half-block on the south side opposite McMobil is grassland and there's been steady opposition to building on it, there's no worry about a canyon effect.  We need to recapture the density that Hyde Park lost by clearing away residences and retail for Nichols Park during urban renewal; building around the edge of the park is a fine way of accomplishing that and the north edge-- across the street from the park-- is a good place to start.  A dormitory would result in fewer cars per residence than most other uses of a similarly sized building.

Windermere West

That's the Windermere West in 1905 at 56th & Cornell, where the new Solstice building will go up.

Creeping Urbanism in Hutchinson, Kansas

I spent Saturday through Wednesday in Hutchinson, Kansas, attending the Withrow family reunion.  The blog was put on autopilot with a handful of canned posts and I removed moderation on the comment area.  Everyone behaved themselves, which doesn't surprise me, so I think I'll just leave moderation off until there's a reason to turn it back on.

The population of Hutch has been about 40,000 for decades, with closer to 65,000 in Reno County.  That's not the kind of place you'd expect to see urbanism rearing its head, but, if you look closely, you can spot the promise of smart growth ahead.  Pic-right shows Main Street near the railroad tracks, with the Amtrak station at the left edge of the photo. 

We were in the area to eat at a BBQ joint just to the left of next pic.  Kansas prohibited liquor by the drink (except in private clubs) until 1986 and now there are a couple bars along this stretch.  You can see that the street facade has been maintained at 309 N. Main by placing the new building slightly behind it.  The new structure itself is Soldier Field-like ugly, but the facade keeps the block looking historic & cool.  Across Main, the Flag Theatre has been renovated with private funds and mostly screens movies for children.

Will Hutch ever see a downtown residential section where a person could live comfortably without a car?  Yes and no.  The closest grocery store to Main & 3rd is about a dozen blocks away, but Hutch is flat and the drivers are reasonably careful, so you could bike just about everywhere, although the town transvestite seems to be the only one who does that.   

On the east side of Hutch, there are a fair number of vacant, small industrial buildings and I'm told that one of them is going to be converted into condos.  That condo site would not have been my first pick-- there's nothing much in walking distance-- but it shows that at least one developer there has a little imagination.

These are baby steps in the direction of the New Urbanism, of course, and nothing compared to what some inner suburbs are doing, but I'm keeping an eye on it.  Housing is cheap, cheap, cheap there, btw.

Neighborhood Trivia

So, where is this stone bench?  Extra credit if you can explain why the hell it's where it is.

Before Zoning

Or, more accurately, this post is about what happened before zoning began to shape Hyde Park's urban landscape.  I refer you to p. 13 in Politics of Urban Renewal by Peter H. Rossi and Robert A. Dentler, written in 1961:

Retail shops strung themselves out in ribbon fashion along 47th, 53rd, and 55th Streets, slicing the grid plan into residential sectors rectangular in shape and bounded by shops on the north and the south sides. Businesses and shops further encircled the natural boundaries of the entire community by hugging the transportation routes -- the streetcar lines along Cottage Grove on the West and the railroad tracks to the east. By 1925 business and commercial developments had settled into the positions they would occupy until redevelopment would alter radically their locations in the area.

By "redevelopment", Rossi meant "urban renewal", when the commercial heart of Hyde Park was suddenly ripped out.  Planning in the late 1950s was primarily about separating residential, commercial and industrial districts.  A couple generations later, most planners believe that residential and commercial uses can be combined along one block.  That's a lesson in itself.  Half of today's planning notions will look terribly wrong 50 years from today; we just don't know which half.

The commercial building patterns that Rossi describes occurred before zoning became mildly effective in the late 1920s.  Those patterns can be seen as natural, in the sense that they were a response to the marketplace rather than the result of government fiat.

My reading about urban renewal has led to me to this primary conclusion: make changes gradually.  Sure, if you're not improving-- a process of death and life for buildings-- then you're really going backwards.  But sudden wholesale changes will probably be regretted later.

(The photo is from the website for the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference and is of 55th Street near Ellis, where the berm is now.)