My out-of-town guest Beth earned a Bachelors degree in Art a couple years ago, so a trip to the Art Institute was a must. Well, it's always a must, but with her it was an extra-special must. Hyde Park Urbanist would like to go on record voicing my profound approval for the new Modern Wing.
I wish I'd taken my real camera, but these IPhone pics might whet your appetite. The first pic looks thru shades at the skyline and Milennium Park. The second depicts the pedestrian bridge leading from the third floor of the Modern Wing to the edge of the Pritzker Pavillion. The bridge offers some terrific views of the skyline and functions as more than just a symbolic link between these two cultural landmarks. The bridge's materials, straightness and gentle incline respect pedestrians.
The main hall of the new wing is cathedralesque and these new spaces present their 20th century pieces quite sensibly. The Modern Wing does all the big things well-- you should use the elevator and look up. Settling in will probably mitigate the few criticisms I might offer-- like the arbitrariness of segregating European art from the American pieces on separate floors, with the extensive Joseph Cornell collection residing in the European section for some reason. The restrooms are fine and maybe the Art Institute considered itself just a little too well-respected to commission interactive pieces, but some museum should do so because I'm sure we've all had the impulse to piss on some art at one time or another.
We took in the Bean, of course, and then Beth was amazed to happen upon a free performance of Handel's Acis and Galatea at the Pritzker Pavillion. I'm not a huge fan of opera; I always wonder what the overwrought hullabaloo is about, with the answer invariably something to do with love & romance. Why can't the main characters just move on with their lives and find someone new on E-Harmony or something? But Beth has a more normal appreciation of romance and she liked the performance just fine.
I mentioned the other day that the Pritzker Pavillion is a fine example of a public space designed by Frank Gehry. Pic-right shows people gathering on the lawn a couple hours before a performance. Millennium Park's a jewel, isn't it? Kids were splashing around the Crown Fountain, going gaga whenever the faces spit water on them. And the Bean's just terrific. All year long, tourists are taking pictures around it. These spaces are wonderfully interactive, a memorable experience for anyone who wanders into our City of Clean Alleys. The world's most expensive parking garage roof is worth ten Soldier Fields.
I used to think that a topic like -- oh, let's see, US-China friction -- was controversial, or climate change, or Google-v-Microsoft, or McNamara-v-Rumsfeld. That was before I innocently stepped into the crossfire concerning the effect of "star-chitects" like Frank Gehry on the urban landscape.
Fallows is one of America's foremost China-hands, an amateur pilot, a technology enthusiast and media expert, but he broached this topic because he attended the Aspen Ideas Festival and witnessed Frank Gehry arrogantly dismissing a line of questions from Fred Kent of Project for Public Spaces. The video of the Gehry session is here, but basically Kent was a bit long-winded asking his question about how we could build iconic buildings as better public spaces and then suggested that Gehry's buildings were often problematic by that measure. Gehry then called Kent "pompous".
Fallows complained about Gehry's behavior and then a few days later published an e-mail from Gehry that Fallows described as "classy in the extreme". The "apology" didn't strike me that way. I thought this section of his e-mail was even worse than calling Kent "pompous":
Turns out that (Kent) followed Tommy Pritzker [the moderator of Gehry's session] around the next day and badgered him about the same issues. His arguments, according to Tommy, didn't hold much water.
A few days later Fallows published a note from Kent, who said he merely ran into Pritzker while having dinner with friends. Terms like "followed around" and "badgered" don't do much to patch things up. What's most grating to me is the condescension. Neither he, the well-paid archtiect (and I think he's alluding to money when he uses the word "figures" at Aspen) or Tommy Pritzker, who uses his inherited billions to promote the archtitecture he likes, thinks much of Kent, so we're supposed to kowtow and consider the argument over.
If Pritzker & Gehry had actually tried to understand Kent, perhaps asking him a question or two to better define "attractive public space", I think they could have cited an example of a Gehry design that works pretty well. I direct your attention to the Jay Pritzker Pavillion (Jay being Tommy's father) at Millenium Park. Personally, I don't really care for all that steel surrounding the bandshell, which Gehry already used for the Disney Center in Los Angeles, and the pedestrian bridge to the east is horrendous, but the spectator areas of the pavillion are very attractive during summer. I can't remember seeing anything else by Gehry that I thought was a good public space, but we should acknowledge this success here in Chicago.
In any case, there's nothing wrong with debating "starchitects", as Discovering Urbanism explains:
It is actually more about function than about style. It's notable that Kent is not quibbling with the aesthetic properties of Gehry's buildings, nor is he questioning their status as works of art. He is casting doubt on the way these buildings are used by people on a regular basis and how they interact with a surrounding urban environment. It's an empirical question, very American actually. Everyone knows Gehry's buildings, particularly the Guggenheim in Bilboa and the Walt Disney Theater in Los Angeles, have become tourist attractions and sites of pilgrimage for modern architecture buffs. Kent is asking how they are used by people who are there for reasons other than seeing the building itself, what role they play in Jane Jacob's "ballet" of urban life.
William Whyte, the founder of Project for Public Spaces), was known for making meticulous observations about how each little detail of public space either encouraged or discouraged its use. How were the steps oriented to allow for sitting and lingering? Where did the shade fall at different times of the day? He watched and videoed places all around the country, with a particular fondness for small spaces that generated a critical mass of human interaction. Architects have come around lately to recognize the importance Whyte placed on monitoring the actual uses of buildings and places. In my opinion, PPS is in the ideal place to ask the empirical questions. I hope the substance of this debate continues, although maybe without any more accusations over self-importance.
I'm glad that Jane Jacobs gets the attention she deserves, but architects who are unfamiliar with Whyte's City: Rediscovering the Center are apt to shortchange us all.
It's photojournalism time. Here at Hyde Park Urbanist, your dedicated reporting and picture-taking staff might be all wrapped up in one person, but that doesn't mean I'm going to shy away from either complicated or controversial news stories. Today I'm going in-depth and undercover to look at how the property owners on the south side of 57th Street deal with the verge-- that strip between the sidewalk and the street. We'll be examining the verge from all way from the Quadrangle Club to the Viaduct at a quick pace, so hold onto your hats!
First stop-- Quad Club. Now owned by the University but the verge here is IIRC pretty much as the University found it. The second pic shows the Fleck House on the right, which I assume is also owned by the University. The Fleck photo shows the telltale signs of a too narrow sidewalk. But even if you get beyond that 2-foot dirt path between the sidewalk and the trees, there's nothing growing in the Fleck House area. The Quad Club has dealt with too narrow sidewalk problems by installing rectangular pieces of stone on its verge. I'd say this works pretty well. The upkeep is next to nothing, the rectangles are attractive and there are intermittent opportunities for pedestrians to pass slower walkers.
Once you cross Woodlawn, you run into the Meadville site, which the University has also just purchased, and some private residences further east. At some point, the previous owners of Meadville dealt with the narrow sidewalk issue by placing some random shaped stones in the muddy area. Not a bad way to approach this, but we could obviously use some more stones on the west end of this stretch and I'd be ok with a variety of shapes & sizes. In the next half black, private residences installed some decent bricks on their verge and the trees are surrounded by planters. This is functional, somewhat permeable and probably doesn't require a lot of upkeep. It's not as green as some of the other choices, but it looks like someone cares for it.
The next couple blocks are commercial. The first photo is outside the 57th Street Bookstore. They've also gone with bricks, but they don't lie flat. The bricks just stop when they get close to the trees, so this looks less cared for. On the other hand, it's less institutional-looking than the street to building concrete in front of the stretch to the east. The expanse of sidewalk along the commercial areas gives folks plenty of room to pass, so I'd call that pedestrian-friendly if we're just talking functionality. The abandoned bike would be a whole 'nother issue, I guess.
After Kenwood, we get back into residential areas. These very stately-looking condos have planted evergreens on their verge. There's no mud path here because the bushes go all the way to the sidewalk. I hate getting caught on this strip of 57th Street sidewalk behind slow walkers because there's no room to pass. This verge choice gets points for green-- and it's green all year around-- but it's not so pedestrian-friendly.
On the street side, the bush should be trimmed back a bit so folks could more easily exit the passenger sides of cars. The first couple times I got stuck here without a passing lane, I tried walking along this little strip, but it's a pain because of how close the bush grows to the street.
The house at the southwest corner of 57th & Dorchester has neglected their verge the same way they neglect snow during the winter. I've seen the woman who owns the house just west shovel the walk and her patch of this verge has been mowed, but not along the corner residence.
Across Dorchester, the grass has grown back for some reason and this verge is mowed. There's also some decent landscaping done on the house side of the sidewalk. Let's give these residential owners some props for trying, but I'm not giving them any bonus points for verge creativity.
At the corner of 57th & Blackstone, we have more residential. On the southwest corner, there's a worn path, muddy when it rains.
Across Blackstone, there's a fenced-in area with some decent looking plants under the trees. There's plenty of room for folks to exit cars. Also, if you're observant, you'll notice that the sidewalk on the east side of Blackstone is two feet wider than on the west side. That two feet tends to make some difference for passing purposes. This stretch doesn't feel as hemmed in. And it looks cared for, although I imagine there's a fair bit of upkeep to this.
Then it's street to building sidewalk all the way to the viaduct. The west portion is commercial but there's an apartment complex on the other side of Powell's. This area is ok, I guess, but it could use a little sprucing up.
A couple years ago, Medici's Bakery displaced sidewalk with outdoor seating. I'm for this, although it doesn't allow much room to get out of cars along the passenger side in those metered spaces. It's a quirky and attractive space and folks seem to enjoy sitting there drinking coffe, which increases the number of eyes on the street. The commercial spaces on either side of Harper Avenue should consider this option.
So, what's the best way to deal with the verge. Well, I don't have a platonic ideal of what a verge should be; there's no one best way to deal with these spaces along a too narrow sidewalk. In fact, if everyone did the same thing, it would be rather un-Hyde Park, wouldn't it? I'd even try to dissuade the University from dealing with their three properties-- Quad Club, Fleck House and Meadville-- consistently. The variety makes those properties feel less institutional.
However, if the bushes for the condos on the southeast corner of Kenwood & 57th were trimmed back on the street side of the verge about a foot and trimmed back two feet along the sidewalk, I think that would be my favorite because it's green all year and permeable. If the bushes were trimmed back along the sidewalk two feet, I'd suggest installing stones, random or not. I'm guessing slow walkers would stick to the sidewalk and the stones would be treated as a passing lane.
The Center for Neighborhood Technology has done a lot of excellent work, including launching the I-Go car sharing program and advocating for cleaner air thru increased transit usage. One of my favorite CNT initiatives is this set of Housing + Transportation indices, including the wonderful maps of Household Auto Greenhouse Gas Emissions, which you can set for many regions. These clearly show that auto use diminishes as population density increases. It's hardly a leap, then, to argue that population density tends to decrease greenhouse gases. From that argument, it's one more small step to then claim it's good for the planet to point development toward projects that will host higher numbers of people on average over all times.
So, now we're back to PLUM (Popular Land Use Metric)* scores, which I introduced as an idea back in February. If we could estimate the number of people physically located on an acre on average over all times, then we'd have that acre's PLUM score. A land use with a higher PLUM score is, by definition, serving more people, which ought to count for something in the planning realm.
On Memorial Day, the New York City Department of Transportation closed several blocks of Broadway to automobile traffic. (A few articles about this made Streetsblog and that's where I stole this photo.) NYDOT is saying that they think this street closure will actually help move traffic, which sounds counter-intuitive. The theory is that Broadway is a diagonal street which creates more than its fair share of intersections. Every intersection has a stoplight. By closing certain blocks, there will be fewer or faster stoplights on streets following the grid pattern.
On the north side of Chicago, we have numerous six-way intersections and my experience leads me to believe that NYDOT has a point. Plus, there's not much harm done by closing some blocks of a diagonal street while keeping others open. It's usually quicker to avoid sections of Milwaukee Avenue or Clark Street and just drive west for a while and then north. Few people take congested areas of these diagonals for more than a couple blocks. They're not used as thru-streets like those following the grid pattern.
In any case, check out the photo and think about this in terms of PLUM scores. Sure, this was Memorial Day and there was a special event. But if this change leads to more people simply being on the space that used to be the automobile section of this block of Broadway-- on average & considering all times-- then that's an argument for keeping this carless.
*(I'm just using this name until someone tells me there's already a planning term that applies to this concept.)
Count me among those who are very skeptical about the outcomes produced by Chicago's affordable housing set-aside programs. Developers are told that some percentage (often 20%) of new residential units must be "affordable". What does this mean in practice?
First of all, what is "affordable"? In the case of the Maxwell Street project, affordable meant $190K condos. You'd have to be middle-class or heavily subsidized to afford these condos. Why should the city be meddling in the housing market to provide a subsidy for the middle class on top of the already overly-generous federal tax deduction for mortgage interest?
But wait, it gets worse. Sun-Times reporters Tim Novak and Chris Fusco actually did the kind of investigative reporting that journalists should be doing and they discovered that the recipients of the Maxwell Street affordable housing subsidy included people who already owned other homes-- not to mention "a 22-year-old whose father co-owns New West Realty, the company that was hired to sell University Village's 900 homes, including the affordable units". According to Fusco & Novak:
Wait, we have a film clip of the alderman:
Why is the alderman surprised? She didn't realize that a handful of middle-class people will tend to benefit from such a set-aside? In truth, Ald. Preckwinkle doesn't seem like the kind of politician who would reward friends with a windfall, but how many other aldermen look upon the affordable housing program as just such an opportunity, a way to transfer money from developers to their friends?
These set-asides probably do more harm than good. Consider the theory of supply & demand plus the simplified notion that developers will build if they forecast profits, if their revenues from a project exceed their costs. The more residences built in Chicago, the more affordable residences there are likely to be. But if the revenues from projects suffer because of affordable housing set-asides, then developers will choose to build fewer residences.
I urge you to read the entire Sun-Times article and to look at the municipal regulations that make constructing new residences more expensive (with parking requirements the chief culprit).
(Photo from Gapers Block and visit Cheat You Fair: The Story of Maxwell Street.)
Metra wants to build a station at IIT/Comiskey Park. The station would displace this building:
No biggie, eh? It's just a little box, right? Well, the little box was designed by Mies van der Rohe. Some preservationists are objecting. But Blair Kamen calls the building "utterly dispensible". Well, I tended to agree until I saw this picture, via Sustainable Cities Collective, from Edward Lifson's blog Hello Beautiful!:
Context makes a big difference, doesn't it? A new building will almost certainly disrupt the sight line that Van der Rohe designed. Be sure to read Lifson's article to consider a perfectly good alternative-- putting the station across the street to the south where there's now an empty field.
Maybe you've seen this graph from a Pew Research Center study where people were asked the following question about each of a series of material goods: "Do you pretty much think of this as a necessity or pretty much think of this as a luxury you could do without?" Arguably, the correct answer to each of these things is probably "luxury you could do without". The good news is that "cars-are-necessities" is down 3% since 2006; the bad news is that cars still rate as necessities for 88% of these respondents.
I can't promise that everyone would enjoy carless living as much as I do, but I think more people would. However, most of these respondents are correct if they believe they need a car to live where they're currently living. Living the carless life starts by choosing to reside in a walkable neighborhood.
We're seeing signs that more and more people are valuing walkability. In an article for American Prospect called "A Tale of Two Exurbs", Ben Adler asserts:
And walkable neighborhood could still be in the suburbs, even the exurbs, as Adler explains by comparing Leesburg, Virginia, with the Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The article's well worth a read.
What does this mean for Chicago? We still have quite a few neighborhoods with rail transit running right thru them that are much less dense than they used to be-- like the neighborhoods on the western edge of Washington Park served so well by the Green Line. Much of the land is already cleared, even. But the same zoning notions that Adler uncovers in sprawling Leesburg are also part of the Chicago development landscape (albeit somewhat less onerous). Parking minimums are the single biggest enemy of walkable neighborhoods and have no place anywhere on the planet.
At the HPKCC board meeting in March, we were discussing the topics that came up at a recent forum and there was a fair bit of consensus on an interesting word-use tension: green. When some Hyde Parkers say they want our neighborhood to be green, they mean they want us to combat global warming. But when others say green, they mean they want Hyde Park to have plenty of trees and lots of grassy fields. There's some tension between these two meanings because parkland tends to reduce density and lower density means higher greenhouse gas emissions. At the board meeting, I made this observation-- or piggy-backed on someone making a similar point.
And then Jack Spicer threw me for a loop, suggesting a third meaning for green: sustainable. I couldn't disagree with that-- mostly because I have no idea what the word means in this context. I feel like Pete Reiser's character in Diner:
Ironically, I was invited this week to become a featured blogger on Sustainable Cities Collective. From what I can tell, I'm supposed to go on blogging just as I always have and the moderators there will pick out appropriate posts to include on their site. They seem to think my blog is pro-sustainability from time to time, which gladdens my heart in some vague, nuance-like way.
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.
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