U of C Public Planning/Zoning Meeting Tonight

posted by Elizabeth Fama

This evening the U of C is holding a public meeting at the International House, 1414 East 59th Street, at 6 PM.

From a U of C official:

The University as a whole is in a planned development zone, and is working with the city right now to update the zone. As part of that process there will be public hearings. Some of the issues that come up have to do with height of buildings, what is in the zone (the University has acquired property since the zone was last formed), etc. The city has requirements for which neighbors should be notified about any planned changes — essentially all residents within 250 feet of the zone perimeter. That group received a letter. In addition, we have done some stories about this to be sure it is much more public.

 

Un-Fortressing Hyde Park

posted by Richard Gill

In March 2008, a public proposal was made, to open 57th Street to westbound traffic at Stony Island Avenue. The proposal went nowhere. For reasons that had nothing to do with the merits of the proposal, it didn’t get pushed. The time is past due to revive the proposal.

At Stony Island, the westbound side of 57th Street is blocked by a barrier that prevents cars from entering. (Photo above.) This has the effect of making 57th one-way eastbound between Lake Park and Stony Island. The barrier is decked out with signs displaying DO NOT ENTER, and directional signs to re-enforce that order.

Welcome to Hyde Park. You and your car may be permitted to come into our neighborhood, but only if you can negotiate our obstacle course.

The barrier has been there for so long, nobody (including CDOT traffic engineers) seems to know exactly when or why it was put there. Looking for clues, I found that it dates to the paranoid days of “the urban renewal,” nearly 50 years ago. According to the Hyde Park Herald edition of February 1, 1961, 57th Street was closed to westbound traffic at Stony Island in September 1960. The change at that time provoked the ire of many, such as residents at 58th & Dorchester who said the one-way designation required them to drive an extra four blocks, just to get home (It still does).

Since 56th Street is also one-way eastbound, this made it extremely difficult to get into Hyde Park, but really easy to get out. Mission accomplished: Build a moat, create an island, keep “outsiders” out. Even if there was any sound basis for insulating the neighborhood in 1960, there isn’t any now, and there hasn’t been for a long time.

Two public meetings were held (March 5 & 12, 2008), to discuss the proposed reopening of 57th Street. Those who objected to opening 57th Street hammered away with unsubstantiated predictions that the sky would fall. They said 57th Street would be choked with traffic, making life intolerable for both motorists and pedestrians. They offered no basis for that prediction, and professional city traffic engineers who had done an analysis debunked it.

It became clear that the objectors are residents along or near 57th Street who now have a semi-private street and want to keep it that way. Since that was their real position, and it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, they resorted to the tactic of bullying and disruption (remember the Point meetings). One of them pushed to the front and seized the floor. That was a sign that they really had nothing to back up their position. This antic wasn’t close to the level of disruption at the Point meetings, but the intent was the same.

So, there we had a handful of people who acted like living along the street meant they owned the street. Does this remind anyone of a recent hotel proposal whose defeat was engineered by a relative handful of people who, when the smoke cleared, simply wished to maintain their position of privilege and to hell with everybody else?

It is time to re-start the street-opening proposal.

Some of the benefits are: more exposure for local businesses; enhanced overall neighborhood traffic flow; easier access to Hyde Park; less circuitousness (with the potential for cleaner air); enhanced safety in front of Bret Harte elementary school with some traffic diverted away from 56th Street: and opportunity for weather-protected direct access for campus buses at the 57th Street Metra station.

Looking east on 57th St. at Lake Park. Signs direct eastbound traffic under the Metra viaduct. The westbound side of 57th is unused and wasted.

The city traffic engineers at the March 2008 meetings said that the proposal is feasible, would result in traffic compatible with residential/commercial streets like 57th, would not compromise traffic safety, and could be implemented with relatively minor and inexpensive signing, marking and channelization. They suggested the change could even be made on a trial basis.

This proposal, which has had local residents’ and merchants’ support (with those exceptions noted above), will also require support by the University of Chicago and Alderman Hairston.

Let’s at least try this idea. Yes, there would be some more people around --visiting, shopping, dining, sightseeing -- but that’s the idea. Hyde Park has begun to emerge from its past as a dull, unwelcoming, and lifeless urban island. Removing the barrier at 57th Street will help that process along, and will make life easier. It isn’t 1960 anymore.

It is time to stop small groups of people from preventing positive and beneficial changes. That would be real Hyde Park Progress.

The Parking Meter Deal: Right Idea, Wrong Reasons

posted by chicago pop

Parking is the gender-bender of urban policy issues. It has the capacity to make free-market Republicans slam their fist on the table in defense of subsidized parking anywhere and anytime, while making social democratic types of a green coloration passionate at the prospect of allowing market-clearing prices for curb parking.

But, like Chicago's notorious Blue Bag recylcing program, the higher rates for curb parking that will accompany the privatization of the city's 36,000 street meters give only the appearance of taking the lead of the civilized world, while in fact doing nothing of the sort, and disappointing both of the above constituencies in the process.

To take a few examples: London has implemented congestion pricing of roadways by zone; Paris has reduced the total number of parking spaces in the city, and has actually increased sidewalk space and built separated bike lanes by removing lanes from major boulevards.

New York City recently debated congestion pricing on the London model. The RAND Corporation has determined that the only realistic policies for congestion reduction in Los Angeles are road pricing and higher parking fees. San Francisco is pioneering a high-tech pilot program that will let parking meters charge a true market rate, based on hourly variations in demand (from $0.25 to $6) at individual meters in a given neighborhood.

If a parking system actually did that -- let the true market cost of public curbside parking vary with demand -- then, as parking researcher and guru Donald Shoup argues, you would considerably reduce congestion, as well as the frustration of circling for a parking spot at ungodly hours in ungodly conditions. You could then channel the revenue, through neighborhood parking benefit districts, to projects in the district area, or to related public goods such as a modernized transportation system in Chicago.

The latter prospect, however, is entirely lost in the Morgan Stanley privatization deal. What could be a long-term revenue generator for a city in budgetary crisis and with an enormous backlog of deferred public transportation maintenance has been traded for a one-time fix in operating revenue.

And it leaves one of the most powerful of transportation planning tools -- parking policy -- in the hands of a privately held company that specializes in parking garages. Is anyone at LAZ Parking, in which Morgan Stanley has an equity stake, thinking about Shoup's parking benefit districts? Will they be monitoring San Francisco's experiment with a spot market in street parking?

It's not clear, but there could be some positives. The fact that Chicago's meters will be owned in part by Morgan Stanley, the former investment bank that has since become a "financial services company", leads one to speculate that LAZ Parking may, at some point in the future, be taken public.

There would be every reason, prior to any IPO, for fully modernizing Chicago's street metering. This could go far beyond the contracted promise of non-cash metering by 2011, to include the San Francisco model of a block-by-block spot market in parking.

For Chicago, the benefits would be real but unintended, and the cash benefits more diffuse. Congestion currently costs Chicago commuters approximately $3,000/year, so any congestion reduction resulting from the reform would have the effect of a tax repeal. But the direct revenue benefits from the higher rates themselves would be foregone.

In the City's press release, not a single word mentions transportation, public transit, or any of the innovations in parking charges that are being tested in other areas to deal with these problems.

With long-term higher gas prices likely, and flat property values in suburban regions, people will still need to come and to stay in Chicago. Devising a system of metered parking that adequately prices that demand would be a great boon to the city, in terms of revenue; in terms of freeing up the supply of parking; and in terms of mitigating congestion and the CO2 emissions given off by cars circling for a parking spot.

If the new deal for parking should make anything clear, it is that street parking is not free. It has been massively subsidized for over half a century (Shoup estimates that in 2002 "the subsidy for off-street parking alone was between $127 billion and $374 billion") such that several generations of Americans have grown to maturity believing that street parking is like air or water -- free and plentiful. But, as our economist friends will tell you, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

And in an age of climate change, unstable oil prices and the foreign wars they generate, the unintended consequences of cheap parking are becoming less and less palatable.

There is thus some solace to be taken in the fact that, despite the bad deal that Chicago signed with Morgan Stanley, cheap parking is obviously going the way of cheap oil and cheap credit -- and largely for the better.

But as always, the devil is in the details. Raising parking meter rates is much easier than raising property taxes. If the City had the will to do this itself, instead of outsourcing the dirty work to a "bank holding company", it might have kept the revenues and used them to make Chicago the sort of world city worthy of hosting the Olympic Games.

[This post also appears on Huffington Post Chicago]

Learning to Love Density: 53rd St. Visioning Workshop Pt. 3 -- Saturday November 15

posted by chicago pop

The third in a series of workshops dealing with development dynamics on Hyde Park's 53rd Street retail district will take place this coming Saturday, November 15 (see flier below).

Hyde Park alum and Metropolitan Planning Council VP for External Relations Peter Skosey helps to explain what the whole things is about, based on a similar workshop done in the Lawndale neighborhood.

Check it out in this video:

Like the previous two 53rd Street workshops, this one will be based on a series of exercises meant to visualize and make tangible the abstract and ominous-sounding notion of "density." Using a method developed in Minneapolis called the Corridor Housing Initiative, the idea is to help people "connect community visions with market realities" through a series of exercises that demonstrate the variety of forms that density can take, and the market constraints that face developers in urban projects.

Logistics below:

Developing Harper Court: What Evanston Can Teach Hyde Park

posted by chicago pop

Optima Towers, 1580 Sherman Avenue, and Borders Location
13-story, 105 Units, Mixed-Use. Completed 2002.

This blog began with a bit of overheard conversation, so it seems appropriate to continue the tradition.

Back in the day, nearly a decade ago, I was living in a flat in Hyde Park's doppelganger neighborhood -- Rogers Park -- and working up in Evanston. Across the hall was a colleague who was doing the same. We both confronted Evanston just moments before it began its transformation. "It's a nice town, but it's just kind of boring," said my neighbor, shortly before moving to Wicker Park.

No more.

As most people know, Evanston has reinvented itself. The interesting thing is that what happened in Evanston could happen in Hyde Park.

Now that the Harper Court parcel is finally up for redevelopment, there is potential to develop these assets in a way that helps reverse decades of relative decline in Hyde Park's struggling commercial district. Just like what happened in Evanston.

As of 2005, the benefits of Evanston's approach were measurable. Downtown Evanston has increased the total number of retailers in its central district by 27% since 1997, boosted total retail sales by 11.2% between 2000 and 2003, has added to the housing stock while keeping its parking requirements lower than surrounding suburbs.

As a result of increased business activity, Evanston has been able to lower its taxes to levels not seen since 1971. Though similar values would not accrue directly to Hyde Park, they are indicative of the improved health of the local economy, some portion of which would be captured by the 53rd Street TIF, and, when this expires, by the local school districts.

Sherman Plaza
25 stories, 253 Units, 1,600 Car Parking Garage, Mixed Use, Completed 2006

Evanston as Example of Smart Growth

The Evanston build-out is considered by progressive urban planners, such as those who prepared the EPA report from which much of the data below is taken,* to be a model of successful smart-growth, transit-oriented development (TOD). It is now a case-study used to demonstrate a few things about how to redevelop urban centers around a commercial district well-served by transit -- exactly the situation that describes Hyde Park's Harper Court and east 53rd Street.

1. It is possible to add density to a district without significantly increasing traffic congestion. This is possible when:
   
2. Full advantage is taken of existing transit infrastructure by placing density within walking distance of transit stations, or using innovative transportation solutions to link to transit from further away.
3. Entertainment and a 24/7 district are the anchors of "downtown" redevelopment.
4. A successful project will be market-driven and demonstrate close cooperation between multiple actors -- municipal authorities, citizen's groups, master developers, Federal and State funding and regulatory agencies, and merchants. And perhaps most importantly:
5. There is a market for walkable, high-density urban environments. The long-term trends are shifting towards this type of real estate, despite the current market downturn.**

By 2005, many of the goals of Evanston's nearly two-decades old planning process had been achieved. They included the addition of 2,500 new housing units, 2.5 million square feet of new office space, the addition of a 175 room Hilton Hotel, construction of Evanston's first high rise in 20 years, the building of a new 1,400 space parking garage, and -- at the center of it all -- a new multimodal transportation center at Davis Street, which facilitates 1,477 weekday transfers between CTA, Metra, and Pace riders, and is used by over 1,000,000 transit riders annually.

Davis Street Station
Federally Funded and Completed in 1994
Source: http://www.chicago-l.org/stations/davis.html

Evanston, a fairly affluent inner-ring suburb, nonetheless had to deal with a dying commercial core and rising taxes well into the 1990s. It was able to revive its downtown and improve its financial standing by leveraging its urban assets -- multi-modal transit access, a safe and vibrant 24 hour district supported by high residential density -- to effectively compete with low-density, low-tax suburban municipalities.


Evanston as A Model for Hyde Park: Parallels and Limits

There are a few very large differences between Hyde Park and Evanston that should be noted at the outset. Hyde Park is not a municipality with the power to collect taxes, issue bonds, and fund major public goods like the new Evanston Public Library. And unlike Evanston, Hyde Park is not a gateway to a string of wealthy northern suburbs, but is surrounded by considerably poorer neighborhoods.

But there are real parallels that make it worthwhile to look closely at how Evanston was able to turn itself around, and ask if the same strategies could be replicated in Hyde Park. The parallels can be grouped into the categories of disadvantages and advantages.

Like Evanston, Hyde Park proper has relatively few large lots open for development. This offers a strong incentive to develop for density, to build up where it is difficult to build out. Like Evanston, Hyde Park is moderately isolated from major expressways and airports (unlike certain suburban localities), has suffered from population loss and stagnation, and has experienced severe erosion of its commercial center.

On the positive side, both communities are attractively situated on the shore of Lake Michigan, which has historically been a zone of higher-density development. Both lie at comparable distances from downtown Chicago (Hyde Park is 2 miles closer). Both communities are known for their diversity, though Hyde Park is considerably smaller (Evanston has 74,000 residents to Hyde Park's roughly 50,000). Both communities are well served by north-south heavy rail lines. Although Hyde Park has no CTA rail link within its borders, it does have several heavily used bus routes, and more convenient access to Lake Shore Drive.

Evanston and Hyde Park, of course, both host major private universities, both of which play large supporting roles in the local economies, and both neighborhoods are known for their charming architecture, walkable layout, and notable historic districts.

Finally, although Hyde Park is a city neighborhood and not a revenue-gathering municipality, it is conceivable that the revenue-gathering 53rd Street TIF District, at the direction of a focused and determined 4th Ward alderman, and with the active support and foresight of Chicago planning agencies, could help spark, finance, and manage the multiple partnerships that any significant development centered on Harper Court will require.

Century Theater Complex, 1715 Maple Avenue, with Adjacent Parking Garage

Making Room for the Market, Nudging Smart Growth

Planning for Evanston's downtown renaissance spanned two decades. It drew upon multiple funding sources, and required consistent leadership and community commitment over time. It required accommodation to some conventional market realities, such as the construction of a large and subsidized parking garage for out-of-town visitors, and the use of subsidies to encourage emerging market trends, such as the preference for walkable living environments with easy access to public transportation.

All of this could stand as a model for the redevelopment of Hyde Park's Harper Court.

Further, the example of Evanston should immediately put to rest an either-or vision of development in Hyde Park that argues for either absolute community or absolute market control of what goes on. As for the market, it must certainly "lead" as it did in Evanston and the evolution of the eventual retail and service mix.

But markets are most effective when the goods, services, and instruments of exchange have all been standardized, and investors know exactly what they are getting. The real estate market, for example, knows very well how to finance and build suburban shopping malls and suburban subdivisions. It has much less familiarity with inner-city, mixed-used, transit-oriented projects, and therefore needs encouragement.

On the other side of the either-or, the fear that the University will control development for its own purposes should also be put to rest. The days of Urban Renewal and large Federal block grants administered by the University are gone. The University itself does not have the expertise to pull off urban mixed-use development that is transit oriented, although it is an essential player. Likewise, the "community" alone, however represented, will need to compromise and work together with market-driven actors who need to make a profit.

In urban redevelopment, partnerships are the name of the game. No one actor can go it alone. That means making yourself attractive to at least some developers. We'll see if, given the conspiratorial world-view of many more vocal old timers, this is something that can happen in Hyde Park.

*See Cali Gorewitz and Gloria Ohland, Communicating the Benefits of TOD: The City of Evanston's Transit Oriented Redevelopment and the Hudson-Bergen Light-Rail Transit System [pdf]
**See survey of relevant market research in Christopher B. Leinberger, The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream, Chapter 5.

53rd Street Workshop Part II This Saturday

posted by chicago pop

Date: Saturday, May 3, 2008
Time: 8:30-9AM Registration/9-12 Workshop
Place: Kenwood Academy
5015 S. Blackstone
RSVP: 773-536-8103 -- or -- 53vision@hydeparkchicago.org
Details: Dress for walking, bring a camera

Crossing 61st Street

posted by chicago pop

Keeping Vacant Lots Vacant in Woodlawn?

The University of Chicago has a longstanding promise, made to representatives of the Woodlawn neighborhood to its south, not to expand south of 61st Street. This agreement was made in 1964, 43 years ago.

At that time, there were two Germanies. China was closed to the outside world. Personal computers did not exist.

Is this pledge, and the anxieties to which it responds, out of date?

I have a feeling it might be. But there's no question that the issue is complicated.

After all, there is expansion through the urban renewal methods of razing and displacing, which did happen in Hyde Park, and didn't happen in Woodlawn; and there are other methods of expansion, through erecting buildings on vacant lots that would otherwise remain magnets for crime, and bringing jobs to a community that will help pay for rents and mortgages.

The University can without a doubt play a role in the latter strategy. It certainly requires sensitivity and open communication with neighbors on the part of the University, but it also requires and openness to change south of 61st Street, with change understood to mean that not all of the people in Woodlawn will always be poor, and that the neighborhood might one day approach the balance of household incomes it has known historically.

Take another look at the above picture of a longtime Woodlawn resident taken near her home. The University, in the end, never did expand south of 61st Street. In fact, it didn't do a thing in Woodlawn during the heyday of urban renewal, when it kept itself busy instead bulldozing solid chunks of Hyde Park.

Hyde Park, comparatively speaking, is now flourishing. Woodlawn has vacant lots the size of city blocks like the one above, not far from where Amadou Cisse was murdered.

The picture is taken from Monday's column by Chicago Tribune writer Dawn Turner Trice, who did the service of pointing out that Amadou Cisse was not the only one murdered recently nearby the University; in fact, two women have been found strangled and burned beyond recognition in garbage cans in or near Washington Park.

Trice spoke with two longtime Woodlawn natives who think the Washington Park homicides would have gotten a lot more media time if they had involved University students. They are probably right. The fact that the Cisse murder got such immediate and sustained attention from the media and from police, Trice argues, is part of why there are powerful racial and class tensions between the University and neighboring Woodlawn to the south.

That's certainly true. But things get a little less clear when the column takes a further turn, and as with so many issues in this part of town, brings it back to real estate. In particular, to the Big Bang of urban renewal, to which so many things around here can be traced back.

Like the idea that, instead of helping to get rid of those vacant lots, provide jobs, and partner with local organizations and developers to build market-rate and affordable housing, the University should be kept out. It all sounds very familiar to anyone who pays attention to Hyde Park politics, because in so many ways the terms of the debate were cast at this historical moment for both neighborhoods.

Trice quotes longtime resident Helen Latimore:

"People still see the University as harboring dreams of taking over our property." Latimore said. "Of waiting until Woodlawn is in such disrepair that all they have to do is swoop down and take it over."

It didn't help that a few years ago, the University hired a planning consultant that recommended the University expand south of 61st Street, which it has long said it wouldn't do. University officials quickly nixed the idea. But not before it reignited the suspicions and the mistrust among some Woodlawn residents.

Woodlawn residents, organized into the vibrant community and civil rights activist organization TWO, helped block University-led urban renewal plans in Woodlawn, and eventually elicited a sort of "61st Street Pledge" from the University in 1964.

But then, in the 1970s, long after most whites had left, most of the black middle class left, too. A neighborhood numbering 81,279 people in 1960, Woodlawn declined to 27,086 in 2000, a loss of 54,193. That kind of loss is not unlike that resulting from the incendiary carpet bombing of a large urban area. It constitutes the death of a neighborhood, if not a large part of a city. The number of vacant lots in Woodlawn and other similar neighborhoods attests to this massive depletion of human capital out of the neighborhood.

But without bringing human capital back in, and allowing investment from outside, things are never going to change.

So does this ban on University development south of 61st Street make any sense today, in the 21st century? Woodlawn may be able to fend for itself, with some of the indirect kind of help and support from the U of C described in a 2006 Chicago Magazine article. And, over the last decade or so, the market has finally started to notice Woodlawn; as the Chicago Reporter notes, "Between 2000 and 2004, the number of single- family attached units sold in Woodlawn tripled."

But this movement represents only a slow nudge towards what Woodlawn used to be. It's been hearly 50 years since things began to slide downhill for Woodlawn, and it may be another 50 before it returns to anything like what it was before it became pocked with vacant lots.

Considering that the University never did tear anything down south of 61st Street, maybe it's time to revisit this old treaty that keeps it behind an asphalt curtain.

Word on 53rd: Don't be Jack

posted by chicago pop

You may remember this ill-fated and short-lived ad campaign run by the CTA a few years ago to discourage vandalism. We don't know if they want it anymore, but we think it might be usefully recycled here in Hyde Park, where "being Jack" is starting to get a bit wearisome, among other places on troubled 53rd St.

You may also remember the late-summer outbreak of classic NIMBY-ism that centered on what to do with the vacant lot at 53rd and Kenwood, the McMobil site. As we detailed in a post of September 19, a group of neighbors petitioned Alderman Preckwinkle with a list of restrictions they felt should be applied to any future development. This included building at variance with Chicago City Code by raising the number of off-street residential parking spaces per unit to 1.5 from 1.1.

The petition also called for a restriction on the height of the building to 4 stories, so as to not breach an unspecified level of "population density," although the site sits immediately to the south of a 6-story building at 5220 S. Kenwood, and is down the street from an 8 story building at 5254 S. Dorchester. This would mean fewer units in the development, which would make each individual unit more expensive.

The petitioners supported these demands with assertions that a larger building with less parking for fewer cars, as originally proposed, would increase congestion, threaten children, block light, and impose other ills for which they could provide no empirical evidence based on concrete site studies or comparable examples.

It turns out that Alderman Preckwinkle agrees with us. It's not hard to see why. The South Side is not the North Side. Given the geography of her ward, she recognizes that the problems north of 47th are not that different from the problems south of 47th: lack of critical mass, too small of a market area to attract retail, support small business, and provide the larger population of solid homes that underlie high-achieving schools. In this context, blocking much-needed development in neighborhoods that have been stagnant for decades seems like the height of lunacy.

But that's just what Jack Spicer is doing with this project.

Jack Spicer obviously doesn't like being told what to do. That comes across pretty clearly in his letter to the Herald (October 31, 2007) in reference to a closed-door meeting between Preckwinkle and the signees of the above-mentioned petition.

At the meeting, the Alderman told us her zoning change would benefit the whole neighborhood, not just a few isolated neighbors. She instructed us to learn to accept change.

That last part was the part Jack didn't like. Here's why.

Whereas Jack has no problem changing the zoning to allow for more parking, he seems offended that a building taller than 4 stories could be allowed there, even though several similar buildings exist within blocks and it would allow for the sale of more affordable units. But, rather than addressing the issues of parking or affordable housing, he makes a different case, that "This "planned development" zoning change would be unilateral and outside of our community's planning history."

How would allowing a building taller than 4 stories, behind one that is 6, and steps away from one that is 8, be "outside of our community's planning history?"

...there are only two buildings on the street taller than four stories is the Versailles at Dorchester Avenue and the Hyde Park Bank building ... They are both more than seventy five years old and zoning law, for good reason, has not allowed tall buildings on 53rd Street since 1957.

What that "good reason" is, is not specified, and there are plenty of things in the '57 code that would freak Jack out if he were held to them -- like its projection of a population of 5 million people living within City limits.

But most interesting given Jack's historical bent is the argument that nearby tall buildings are no precedent because they are so old. We wish he were so easily relieved of attachment to the past in the case of Doctors Hospital; we may remind him of that when it comes in handy.

But what gets to the heart of the matter is the attitude towards development, which speaks for itself. An "outsized" building (no definition of "outsized" being given) "benefits only two individuals [the property owner and the developer]" and "takes public value and transfers it to a private property owner without compensation to the public."

With an attitude like this towards developers, it's no wonder we all have to do our shopping half-an-hour away. What is the public value that is being transferred, and how is a private property owner who provides homes for people to live in, new residents to walk, shop, eat, fill the street and pay taxes in the neighborhood, equate to a lack of compensation to the public?

Jack makes a lot of hay about the sanctity of zoning, but ignores it when it comes to parking; he pays a lot of attention to the history of Doctors Hospital, but ignores historical precedent when it applies to 53rd Street. Distracted by a contempt for developers, he ignores the multiple benefits of greater density and having more households living in the neighborhood.

If you're tired of driving everywhere to do your shopping, you'll agree that it's time to Stop Being Jack.

Hans Morsbach, the New Normal Medici, and Harper Court

posted by chicago pop

Local burger magnate Hans Morsbach has strong feelings on Harper Court. We shouldn't tear it down, he says, because it would be against Hyde Park's principles and ideals.

But when the demolition is going on in someone else's town, it doesn't seem to be a problem. Witness the soon-to-open new Medici Restaurant in Normal, Illinois.

Interior of New Medici, Normal, Illinois

The rendering above portrays the interior of the newest outpost of the Hans Morsbach empire, the beer-and-burger cash cow that will soon open in the hometown of Illinois State University. The building is all-new construction partly subsidized by the Town of Normal as part of a very ambitious and radical redesign of its central business district.

Morsbach is a prime beneficiary of a tear-down and subsidized redevelopment done according to explicit New Urbanist design principles. I've had coffee across the street from the new Medici, and it looks damn good. Too bad this is the exact opposite of what some Hyde Parkers, including Morsbach, want to do with our own dilapidated, low-traffic commercial district at Harper Court.

The plan for Normal, a product of the Chicago new urbanist and sustainable design firm Farr Associates, has entailed the demolition of wide swaths of the downtown area, including numerous buildings built over the last several decades. As with Hyde Park, a new Marriott hotel is slated as an anchor for the redevelopment, along with a children's museum, and a major municipal commitment to bring about an integrated streetfront design that recalls the commercial heyday of the town in the early 20th century.

Medici site, previous building

The image above is the nondescript 1980s era building that was demolished to make room for this, the new home of the Medici, Normal.

New Medici, October 2007

As you can see, the new building was erected with a facade that refers explicitly to the remaining historical buildings in the area. To guarantee this harmony of new and old facades and a pleasant sidewalk experience for pedestrians, the Town of Normal adopted a set of design stipulations, tied to grants and low-interest loans for facade and structural redevelopment. One example of this comprehensive new urbanist approach -- which required sidewalk-fronting facades, and historical decoration -- is the very pleasant building picture above, one of several that help to restore the downtown's historical integrity, charm, and walkability.

So what does Normal have to do with Harper Court, and Harper Court to do with Normal?

Let's ask Hans Morsbach, because he has some very specific ideas about what to do with Harper Court:

I strongly believe the answer to Harper Court's trouble lies in doing a better management job rather than tearing the place down. The rationale put forward for the redevelopment scheme is not credible, no matter how many consultants were engaged to gussy it up. (April 12, 2006)

Morsbach backs up this position by arguing that retail is declining in Hyde Park -- with the curious exception of his stretch of 57th Street -- and any redevelopment at Harper Court -- including a tear down and new construction -- would be fruitless.

Can we assume, as the backers of redevelopment do that a redone Harper Court, larger and more expensive, will somehow do a better job than the current incarnation? ... I seriously doubt that the veterinarian, the restaurants and other establishments will be better served by new and presumably more expensive retail space. More importantly, I doubt that these businesses will find it easy to survive the disruption the redevelopment project imposes on them.

So let's review:

• Hans Morsbach's new restaurant in Normal, Illinois, is in a new building that takes the place of a previous retail establishment that was displaced and demolished. Numerous other long-standing businesses were also displaced, but Morsbach is obviously happy with the new, modern space: as he told the Maroon, "It's beautiful and it's huge."

• The Normal Town Council, after watching their central business district decline for three decades, decided to turn it around. To do that, "consultants were engaged to gussy it up." Morsbach isn't complaining.

• Morsbach obviously expects that "redevelopment [of downtown Normal] ... will somehow do a better job than the current incarnation," and that the redevelopment is better than "doing a better management job." Otherwise, he wouldn't have sunk his money into it. But when it comes to Harper Court, it's apparently better to stick with the status quo, despite the striking case of Toys Etcetera demonstrating that a small business can make money in Hyde Park, just not at Harper Court.

• The most delicious irony is to be found in Morsbach's comparison of Harper Court redevelopment with a "Second Coming of Urban Renewal," when his new restaurant in Normal is a beneficiary of publicly subsidized demolition of major chunks of its downtown, including portions of entire city blocks, as shown below.

Mr. Morsbach seems to care a lot about principles when it comes to renewing Harper Court. But when Urban Renewal arrives in Normal, Illinois, it's a great business opportunity. Perhaps it's time for Mr. Morsbach follow the same business principles in his own neighborhood that he follows in someone else's.

Doctor's Hospital and Urban Claustrophobia

It's been a while since we've read anything from Notable Local Guy, J-Spice, who has no official Cabinet position in the Establishment junta, but acts in a variety of capacities -- including, in this instance, adviser to the venerable Hyde Park Antiquarian Society.

At issue in the most recent letter from J-Spice to the Herald (September 7, 2007) is the burning question of how to respond to the University's plan to demolish the Doctor's Hospital and replace it with a high-rise Marriott hotel.

In the great tradition of Hyde Park activism -- or, considering the disintegrating revetments at the Point, perhaps the not-so-great tradition -- alternative plans for the Hospital site have been drawn up that purport both to accommodate the University's plans, and to re-use up to 80% of the original structure. This new-found spirit of compromise is certainly better than the pure obstructionism that has left the Point slowly washing into Lake Michigan, and so we say let's have a look.

We hope that the alternative plan, in addition to preserving the facade and layout, preserves the spirit of the place as well. Its unique ambiance should be adapted to the building's new functions as a hotel, perhaps anchored by an Amputation Lounge for the white tablecloth crowd; a Pathology Bistro for more of a quick fix; and, for Starwood Preferred guests, room selection from among the Polio, Smallpox, or Consumption Suites, with possible upgrades to penthouse lake views from the Blunt Head Trauma Deck.

Turning now to our leading theme, the classic Hyde Park phobia to which J-Spice gives such eloquent expression in this week's letter: "urban claustrophobia."

Establishment Individual Experiences
Urban Claustrophobia

What is urban claustrophobia? That penned-in feeling people get when they try to pretend that they are living in a bucolic, suburban parkland, when actually living near the heart of a metropolis of 8 million people. It's something the Marriott would cause, but the Doctor's Hospital doesn't.

In simple terms, it is a distaste for too many buildings, too many people, and too much congestion. Indeed, too much of anything. This urbano-phobic condition should not be surprising in a letter contributed on behalf of the Hyde Park Antiquarian Society which, being antiquarian, necessarily celebrates the semi-suburban heritage of Hyde Park.

The problem that can arise, however, is that celebrating the semi-suburban heritage of Hyde Park can lead one to try to preserve Hyde Park as a real suburb. As we have pointed out before, Hyde Park is not, and has not been a suburb for over a century. Preserving intrinsically suburban aspects of our neighborhood may actually do a disservice to the community, leading to pernicious effects when pursued in an area that has become fully integrated into a vast metropolitan region.

For J-Spice, the advantage of the existing Hospital building over its proposed replacement derives from the fact that its "set-back softens its impact on the street and ensures that any new, larger building added to the site would be even further west and away from the street, causing less urban claustrophobia and blocking fewer views."

*(The views in question are presumably those from the Vista Homes. We would prefer it if there was something blocking views of Vista Homes.)

The first question we would put to anyone suffering from "urban claustrophobia" is, quite simply, Why do you live in a city?

But more fundamentally, the preservationist drive in this case is tied to anachronistic design principles. Is there a need to "soften [the Marriott's] impact on the street"? Why? What does this mean concretely? How is this "impact" a problem, and according to whom? If a building built to the sidewalk generates claustrophobia in J-Spice or anyone else, that's rather unfortunate. But this particular hang-up requires therapy, or perhaps a stint in some sprawling suburb. It shouldn't determine how we site city buildings.

On the contrary, a building that comes directly to the public space of the sidewalk, and thereby encourages pedestrians to inhabit the space rather than merely travel through it or use it as a buffer, has multiple benefits to the sidewalk culture that is the most basic strand in the social fabric of cities. The most popular neighborhoods in Chicago have this quality, and newer projects are reverting to it. For Jane Jacobs, the sidewalk was the atomic unit of urban planning.

The stretch of Stony Island in question is barren and uninviting. There is very little pedestrian traffic. You want to get in a car and leave. The call for major buildings to be kept off or pushed away from the street is classic Urban Renewal, and like it demonstrates how this preservation effort is driven by fundamentally anti-urban sensibilities. It seeks to insulate, push back, cut off, turn in. Ultimately, this attitude represents a profound distrust of one's neighbors.

It may be possible to preserve and adapt an old building that only antiquarians could love. But let's not import bad suburban ideas into the city at the same time.

The Devil and Daniel Burnham

One of the reasons cited by the Hyde Park Antiquarian Society for preserving the unremarkable Doctor's Hospital is that it "addresses Jackson Park in exactly the way Daniel Burnham envisioned in his Plan of 1909." Now, Daniel Burnham was an important architect, but it's far from clear that he was a good city planner, and it's on the basis of the latter creds that we're being asked to value this building. The fabled and grandiose 1909 plan is breathtaking but utterly unrealistic, outdoing in its vision what the French Baron von Haussmann actually accomplished in the wake of his massive tear-down projects in the Paris of the 1860s, and rivaling some of the more outlandish schemes of later German modernists.

Which is all to say that, if you take one good look at the above illustration, you'll see that Burnham was crazy. His vision of Chicago as a beaux-arts European capital (Paris), as Northwestern University's urban historian Janet Abu-Lughod argues, was completely at odds with the attempts of Chicago's architectural luminaries, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, to find an architecture that was native to the American experience. The 1909 plans reflect the megalomania of one man, backed by the newfound riches of Chicago's industrial and commercial elite enamored with the cultural conventions of Old Europe.

It was also completely at odds with the economic reality of Chicago as one of the nation's top 3 industrial cities with an enormous and frequently striking proletariat, none of which figures in the pleasing aquatints of the 1909 Plan. Chances are that Louis Sullivan would not have thought much of the Euro-philic Georgian revival style of the Doctor's Hospital, to say nothing of the 1909 Plan, modeled as it was on the Neo-Classical, wedding-cake monstrosities of the 1893 World's Fair, which Sullivan is on record as loathing.

So when we are asked to appreciate the value of the Doctor's Hospital because it "addresses Jackson Park in exactly the way Daniel Burnham envisioned in his Plan of 1909", let's remember that this wouldn't have carried much weight with Louis Sullivan, and that there are good reasons why precious little of that Plan ever materialized -- because it had very little to do with the social or economic reality of Chicago as a meatpacking, steel-forging, Haymarket Rioting town resembling Paris only in the minds of a small elite.

Ask Jane Jacobs

Introducing yet another feature on Hyde Park Progress, to appear from time to time, dealing specifically with issues of urban planning and design: Ask Jane Jacobs.

Hyde Parkers seem to know a lot about Daniel Burnham and his 1909 plan for the city, and folks like Jens Jensen and Frederick Law Olmsted. But, given the general antiquarian outlook of The Establishment, this backward looking orientation has not kept up with the most progressive thinking about how cities operate.

Which is why we think the discussion on change in Hyde Park-Kenwood and the South Side needs a firmer theoretical basis. The basic impulse driving Establishment obstructionism is NIMBYism, akin to that found in suburbs (and I repeatedly make this point, the subtext being that Hyde Park is NOT a suburb -- at least it hasn't been one since it was annexed by the City over 100 years ago...). Beyond that, Establishment thinking tends to cling to a line of thought going back through urban critics Lewis Mumford and Ebenezer Howard which tends to be more interested in gardens than in cities.

Jane Jacobs rejected core principles of this tradition. She did so while also providing one of the earliest and most cutting critiques of Urban Renewal. Her credentials as an urban liberal are therefore impeccable. Taking as her model Greenwich Village in New York City, she produced a set of analytic concepts for understanding what a city is that undergird much of the New Urbanism. She understood cities first and foremost as economies that operate on a local scale. This fundamental perception is one that is sorely lacking in current Establishment discourse.

Like Hyde Parkers, she wanted to 'save' her neighborhood, and she did. But she approached the problem empirically, rather than seeking to impose utopian ideals on a messy reality. We need more of Ms. Jacob's sensible and urbane sensibility.

That's why she is our Hero, and we will be asking her spirit for guidance as local issues arise in the neighborhood.