Demolition Man: How Hans Morsbach Razed the Hyde Park YMCA

posted by chicago pop

"A vacant lot is not a pleasant site, but at this juncture, it is better than a decaying, dangerous building."*

-Hyde Park Herald editorial, on demolition of the 1907 Hyde Park YMCA in 1983

In light of recent events surrounding Doctor's Hospital, it is interesting to look back to the treatment of another historic building of the same vintage, the Hyde Park Division of the Chicago YMCA, at what is now the Dorchester Commons mini-mall.

Based on the Doctors Hospital episode, you may think you already know what happens when you have a historic, pre-World War I building, a neighborhood landmark that for several generations provided service to the community, that is suddenly shuttered and stands empty for several years.

The neighborhood rallies to save it, the effort is spearheaded by pillars of the community, including restaurant owner and concessionnaire Hans Morsbach, who use an obscure law to outwit a large and bumbling institution, thus preserving the historical integrity of the neighborhood, and keeping out unwanted commerce.

Wrong!

You don't do any of that. Instead, you tear down the blighted building within two years (Doctors Hospital has been vacant for nine). Instead of a labor union, you get the University to pick up your legal costs. And if any so-called "preservationists" make a ruckus and start floating conspiracy theories involving backroom maneuvers by the University, you call in the local newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, to give you unconditional support and tell them what the neighborhood really wants: Tear down that old eyesore because it's within 1,200 feet of my property!

And you pave the way for its replacement, not by a top-notch building by a famous German or Italian architect worthy of Harper Avenue, but by ... a suburban-style minimall.

Here's what the Herald, that unwavering champion of unwavering community values, had to say about the sad fate of the old YMCA building.

The long-awaited demolition of the Hyde Park YMCA building has finally begun...

It was clear ... to the community at large that the outmoded building could not be salvaged at a reasonable cost. We are pleased that the developer ... has recognized that the community wanted that building removed before any serious incident occurred in this massive property which was becoming a haven for derelicts, thieves, and mischief-makers.

Here is the best part:

We do not give credence to the notion being bruited about the community that tearing down the building was a "conspiracy." If one wants to define a conspiracy in this case as a concerted effort by many people and institutions to keep Hyde Park-Kenwood from becoming a slum, so be it. It is always sad when a neighborhood landmark is torn down. In this case, it is doubly sad because this proud building rapidly deteriorated before our eyes.

Hyde Park YMCA, Front Door
[Source, Hyde Park Herald, June 17, 1959]

The essential details of the story are this: for financial reasons, the YMCA decided to close its Hyde Park facility in August of 1980. By the end of September, the 74 year old building was vacant. By the spring of 1981, a small group of neighbors, among them Hans Morsbach, and represented by the South East Chicago Commission (SECC), filed suit against the YMCA claiming that "the boarded-up property is a threat to their property because of its deteriorated condition," and that it was "an imminent threat to the health and safety of plantiffs, the plaintiff's neighbors, and the surrounding area."

The plaintiffs in the case invoked an obscure municipal ordinance according to which neighbors who lived or owned property within a certain distance -- 1,200 feet -- of an abandoned or dilapidated building could sue the owner to allow for demolition by the City. In 1981, the YMCA came close to finding a buyer, a developer who expressed an interest in gutting the structure and converting it to rental apartments which would include, it was stressed at the time, no Section 8 units.

The deal fell through, the lawsuit was successful, and Morsbach's group had the old building demolished.

Perhaps Morsbach's effort to keep the 1916 Doctors Hospital building vacant for nine years running somehow makes cosmic amends for helping to demolish a 1907 building that was vacant for only 2.

*[Source: http://ddd-hph.dlconsulting.com/cgi-bin/newshph?a=d&d=HPH19590617.1.2&e=00-00-0000-99-99-9999--20--1----YMCA+photo-all ]

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.

Missing the Towers

posted by Richard Gill

Lever bank of 67th Street Metra Control Tower
[Photo by Mark Llanuza]

On May 18, Metra Electric shut down the 67th Street control tower and transferred its function to the Central Control Facility downtown. The 67th Street tower, technically known as an interlocking, was the last of its breed on Metra Electric, and probably the last on all lines of the former Illinois Central Railroad. The electro-mechanical operation embodied in the 83 year old tower has been long surpassed by generations of electronics and communications technology.

I suppose this was an insignificant event, as events go. However, because this last remaining old workhorse happened to be in our neighborhood, its passing may carry with it a bit of a local historical edge. Ok, I worked there in the 1960s, so its passing also carries a bit of a personal edge.

Facilities like the 67th Street interlocking were responsible for controlling and routing train traffic through railroad crossings and junctions like the track complex at 67th Street. Through a tangle of manual levers, steel blocks, rods, mechanical relays, and small electric motors, operators would move switch points and set signals to keep the railroad fluid. The “interlocking” feature prevented the operator from clearing conflicting train movements and from moving switch points under a train.

51st Street Metra Control Tower
[Photo by Mark Llanuza]

The 67th Street tower is a nondescript two-story brick building on the west edge of the right-of-way near 67th Street. Its companion building, closed 46 years ago, sits on the west side of the tracks at 51st Street. The 51st Street building now serves as a store room, and 67th is expected to do the same. You’ve probably seen and barely noticed one or both of these structures. Unremarkable though they may appear, they have been immensely important to the mobility of people and goods through the years.

Towers, I miss ye.

The Piano Lesson @ Court Theater

posted by chicago pop

A.C. Smith portrays Doaker in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson
at Court Theater*

At the center of a room in Pittsburgh stands an ancient, upright piano, its legs and body decorated with distinctive carvings. In the house that holds the piano lives a widow with her young daughter, and her widowed uncle. Into their home enter two men from Mississippi -- family -- the widow's brother, whose father was killed a quarter century before, and a young man hoping to flee the injustice and hard rural labor of the South.

All this family can claim as its patrimony, a family strained by the dispersal of the Great Migration, and ruptured by the violent destruction of its men, is the 137 year-old piano.

The fate of this object is the subject of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning, 1987 play, the fourth in his epic "Century Cycle" of dramas exploring the experience of African-Americans across each decade of the twentieth century.

With a story of two siblings drawing the remnants of their kin into their dispute, Wilson presents a classic tale of sibling rivalry and, in the conflict over how to divide the family's inheritance, a struggle to achieve reconciliation with the past.

For this family, that past is dominated by slavery. The piano formerly belonged to the owner of the family's ancestors, and was bought by the slave owner in exchange for the grandmother and father of Doaker (above), whose likenesses were then carved onto the piano's body.

The piano is thus an ambivalent object, one with a sentimental link to a horrible past, and a money value that recalls the commodification of the slaves it was once bartered against.

Berniece (Tyla Abercumbie) and Boy Willie (Ronald L. Conner)
Argue Over the Family Piano*

What should be done with this object? Boy Willie , up from Mississippi, wants to sell it and use the money, fulfilling the long deferred promise of Emancipation by buying land and gaining independence as a free, yeoman farmer.

Berniece, Boy Willie's sister, resists her brother's entrepreneurial plans, and wants to keep the piano as a link to her dead mother in the past, as well as with her living daughter in the present, who is receiving formal piano lessons but knows nothing of its story.

The piano is the capital accumulation of one family, but is understood as a different type of capital by Boy Willie and Berniece, in a way that reflects the distinct gender roles of 1930's America: for Boy Willie the piano is economic capital, a commodity to be converted to cash for the purposes of investment and economic self-improvement, a prospect which is not equally available to Berniece, for whom the symbolic capital of the object, a sort of shrine to a tattered family heritage, far outweighs its selling price.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Wilson's play is its reliance on a literal haunting of the piano by a deceased white landowner to move the plot to resolution. But it works, whether taken literally or figuratively as the haunting of 1930's American with Jim Crow and the unfulfilled promises of the post-Reconstruction era.

In other ways, Wilson's play draws upon many genres and conventions, from slapstick to musical: the most moving sequence is arguably the field worker's song joined in by the men as they remember days in the South. The production suffered from only a few flaws, such as unintentional bumping of furniture, or a noticeable pause in Smith's recitation at one point.

My fellow theater-goer that evening, originally from the East Coast, remarked that anywhere else, he would expect a theater of Court's quality to be in the liveliest, most vibrant entertainment district of a large city, steps away from the after-theater bars, bistros and restaurants.

At one time, 55th Street might have filled that role, and the washed up piano man Wining Boy in Wilson's play, when he exited the stage, might have felt comfortable crossing the street and pounding the ivories till the early morning.

Though those days are gone, the attraction of the Court's productions is consistently high enough to accomplish what we spend so much time encouraging on this blog: draw people to the neighborhood from the rest of the city. On the night we were there, people were being turned away from the box office. That's the kind of problem we could use more of in Hyde Park.


*Image source: http://www.courttheatre.org/season/show/the_piano_lesson/

The Landlords of Hyde Park: How to Go Ghetto at 55th and HP Boulevard

posted by chicago pop

I'm very fond of the intersection of Hyde Park Boulevard and 55th Street. It's got good bones. Take away the bus stops and contemporary signage, and a location scout might be able to convince a Hollywood producer that the panorama was vintage Chicago, ca. 1925. Looking down HPB to the south, the lawn and majestic facade of the Museum of Science and Industry; to the east, Promontory Point; to the north, the wide, tree-shaded boulevard.

It's too bad, then, that the landlord of one prominent building at this intersection has decided to go ghetto with their property, and grace it with this classy little establishment:

Extra Cheeseball Points for Big Vinyl Banner at
You Roll-em Smoke Shop
(they sell phone cards, too)

You may know the building I'm talking about. It's the handsome structure on the SE corner of Hyde Park Boulevard and 55th that has been a dynamic incubator of Hyde Park small retail, or at least an incubator of awesome cosmetology signage:

Lotsa Plastic Earns Respectable Cheeseball Points

...or,

Ooops! Mr. & Mrs. Hair Weave Don't Live Here Anymore...
All Cheesball Points Forfeited

The latest addition, the smoke shop at 5503 1/2 S. Hyde Park Boulevard, is not to be outdone in in the aesthetics of cheesy signage, which happens to spill over into public space:

Urban Loveliness of "Tobacco for Less" at the 5500 building of S. Hyde Park Boulevard

This is simply an atrocity.

Especially when you know something about the backstory of the little walk-down space at 5503 1/2: the ceiling collapsed on the former tenant, a high-end bike shop, raining mold and asbestos throughout the space. The tenant relocated elsewhere in Hyde Park, and 5503 1/2 sat empty for over a year. It's not clear what repairs were made and whether the environmental hazard was addressed. What is clear is that the former tenant, Tati Bike Shop, was the kind of unique, boutique retail operation that everyone in Hyde Park says they want.

What replaced it is not.

We happen to know that the owner of this building is also the proud landlord of a similarly maintained property at the SW corner of 53rd and Harper Avenue (west of Pizza Capri, and directly south of the old Herald Building), where you can also get bongs, smokes, phone cards, maybe a few extra cardboard cut-out Wild Turkey signs, and knock-off perfume laced with pheremones that will "drive him wild."

So we've decided to give this landlord our quarterly HPP's Favorite Landlord Award. Contestant must score high points in each of the following categories:

1) Plentiful, Cheesy Retail Signage
2) Overall Ghetto Flavor and Wide Selection of Cheeseball Products
3) Locating as Many Hair and Nail Salons on One Strip as Possible
4) Giving a Lease to the Guys who Run That Other Bongs-Smokes-and-Pheremones Place on 53rd St.

This quarter, the award goes to the landlord of 5500 S. Hyde Park Boulevard, hands down. Congratulations! Hyde Park welcomes you!

TIF Meeting Monday May 11, 2009

"Yes, love, it's another TIF meeting. Must you go?"

There will be a meeting of the 53rd Street TIF Advisory Council this coming Monday, May 11, 2009, at Kenwood Academy, 5015 S. Blackstone, at 7PM.

The agenda will include the following:

1. Harper Court Arts Council update -- Mary Anton, Harper Court Arts Council
   
2. Cleanslate 2009 budget revision -- decrease from $157,000 to $150,000
3. Zoning change request for 1350 E. 53rd St. by the Silliman Group, LLC, agent for the building owner, Kenwood Court, LLC.

The proposed zoning change is from B1-2 (Neighborhood Shopping District) to B3-2 (Community Shopping District). The application is being made, in part, so that future commercial tenants at the Subject Property" would be able to apply for City licenses that would, if approved, permit them to function as "General Restaurants" and defines a General Restaurant as "a restaurant in which alcoholic liquor may be served in conjunction with the primary activity (prepared food service) and in which live entertainment and dancing are permitted in completely enclosed areas. This is not possible under the current zoning.

Caryl Yasko's Labor of Love

posted by Elizabeth Fama

If you passed by the 55th Street mural, Under City Stone (c. 1972), last summer, you might have seen the artist, Caryl Yasko working to restore it. She spent several weeks there, if I'm not mistaken. All I know is that in less time, my daughter painted a mural of a pod of hippos and an entire African landscape on all four of her bathroom walls. I'm not sure who is funding the restoration, but as of March, 2008, the Chicago Public Art Group was still trying to find a donor for its repair. Perhaps Ms. Yasko was donating her time.

You can see from the water on the ground that this mural gets a fair amount of weathering. The new steel frame "bent" system that supports the viaduct does not prevent seepage. In the middle of winter, there was a gigantic icicle spitefully crawling down the middle of the restored section of the mural.

In short: this particular wall is not suited for lasting mural art. Either that, or someone needs to maintain it almost annually. But how about this instead: maybe the mural artists should rotate, and we should accept that it's an impermanent art form? Or, if it's cheaper, maybe we can put up panel art, as is slated for the 53rd Street viaduct, and we can actually rotate the pieces periodically, rather than be tied to the art trends of the past?

Personally, I'm in the mood for hippos.

The University's New Office of Civic Engagement

posted by chicago pop

Metra's Stairway to Hell at 59th Street

Symbol of Chicago's "Emerging Status as A Global City"

This past Friday, April 24, may be one of the very few times that I ever get valet service for my car in Hyde Park. In front of the School of Social Services Administration, no less. But this was no First Friday at the MCA, James Bond's Aston Martin twirling on a dais beside the jazz band, with goat cheese and salmon canapés circulating through the crowd.

This was Vice President of the Office of Civic Engagement's Ann Marie Lipinski's coming out party, her debutante gala, at which the policy orientation of the University of Chicago in the post-Hank Webber period was rolled out a short three months after her arrival to the newly-created position in January, 2009. Co-blogger Elizabeth Fama and I were kindly invited to share in the ceremony (photographs of the event are hers).

A press release back in January summed up Ann Marie's new job this way:

In her new position, Lipinski will work to share the University's innovative models for civic engagement with peer institutions around the nation, and to learn from those universities' efforts. She also will develop the connection between the University's new international efforts and the city's emerging status as a global city.

I bring this up only to stress that my assessment going into the "Engaging our Communities" meeting last Friday was that there are a lot of little, simple things the University could do that would improve the appearance it gives to the world, from helping to fix the ratty and scary Metra Station at 59th Street, removing the "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here" sign at the westbound lane of 57th and Stony Island, or taking simple steps to reassure residents in advance of major projects or changes that the sky won't be falling down.

In short, the biggest problem the University has, in my view, is a PR problem. Other problems are very real -- economic, social, financial -- but the biggest and potentially easiest to fix is the public relations angle. The University of Chicago, world class institution in a world class city, with a urine-soaked, dangerous, and ramshackle gateway at 59th Street?

The new Zimmer-Lipinski regime seems to be on to this, and we can only cross our fingers that they will leave the siege mentality of the post-war era behind, have confidence in the University's positive contribution to the neighborhood and South Side, know how to listen, and when to move forward in spite of controversy.

Ann Marie Lipinski
VP, Office of Civic Engagement

In her opening remarks, Lipinski spoke of the narratives that have been used to tell the story of Hyde Park and its Gothic Seigneur. One narrative was that of an institution "founded as an outward-looking" one. Another was a story of "retreat, a turning back on a changing world." What Lipinski was there to suggest was the possibility of a "third narrative."

Just what the content of this third narrative might be was indicated in the proceedings that followed, all of which emphasized varieties of "technology transfer" from advanced research across the University, to practical applications in policing, education, and public health.

The University, as the message is to be understood, is a resource for the local, area, and metropolitan community. Lipinski outlined programs developed to facilitate more effective workplace recruitment from the surrounding neighborhoods, a new "crime lab", and the major project pending at Harper Court. A range of speakers from the Medical Center, the University Charter School, and Kenwood Academy all reflected on the benefits of having access to academic knowledge with real-world implications.

At a rhetorical level, and as a branding strategy, this is a positive and savvy step: to "pivot", as one attendee put it, from a perception of Hyde Park as being in a "deficit situation," to the perception of a place that is greatly advantaged by its proximity to the University.

Whether the course of events during Lipinski's tenure lives up to this welcome change in perspective remains to be seen. I confess to a feeling of surreality as I listened to Stacy Lindau and Doriane Miller describe the organization and goals of the Center for Community Health and Vitality at the Medical Center, with no reference made to the national media scandal of the Hospital's Emergency Room policy and the uproar within the medical profession.

After all, if anything is giving the University a black eye at a national level, this is it. But this live issue, with more real-world import than the still-in-development Center, was left untouched.

Instead, attendees were presented with the following incomprehensible chart:


Everyone I've ever talked to who has worked in Medical Center administration has told me that it's a monstrous bureaucracy comparable to the Pentagon; such charts do nothing to dispel that impression. The well-meaning talk of using data to improve local health care delivery, when there is a very real possibility that the Medical Center's ER policy is in violation of federal law, was jarring.

The audience, comprised mostly of representatives of local community organizations, and largely African-American, seemed receptive to the tone of the meeting, though some of the comments in the Q&A session point to the fine line that Lipinski's outreach has to walk between proffering the University as a resource, and offering it as the promise of a free lunch.

As one questioner put it, directing his comment to Lipinski, in tones reminiscent of many other Hyde Park community meetings:

Everyone I see working here and working at the University doesn't look like me. I'm not a minority, I represent black people who live on the south side. You don't really answer anyone's questions. You just talk around everything. You say you hired 130 people from around here, but I don't know anyone who got one of those jobs. You keep eschewing the point: how are black people going to access the University's resources, access its largess?

This person's remark -- an individual who happened to be working towards a degree at the SSA -- represents the far side of the fine line the University has to walk in relation to surrounding neighborhoods: positioning itself as a resource, but not a social service agency; and certainly not the apex of a patronage system obligated to support a clientele of dependents by showering it with goods and services. It can do its part to help fix area schools, but it can't fix all of them; it can hire some people, but not all of them.

Q&A at the "Engaging our Communities" Meeting

Part of the new orientation must be walking away from the guilt-driven policies of the past that enable this kind of debilitating discourse. Making Hyde Park prosperous, safe, and interesting is not done at the "expense" of other neighborhoods. It is a great opportunity for other neighborhoods to benefit from having a prosperous, safe, and interesting neighbor.

The University's challenge, moving forward, is not to shoot itself in the foot. It already shot off one foot with the $10 million Doctors Hospital fiasco. It is slowly sawing off the other foot with the Emergency Room scandal. Meanwhile, a host of other smaller actions, each of which could generate volumes of good-will going forward, linger unaddressed. As with the Pentagon, we hope the new Zimmer-Lipinski regime recognizes the importance of "soft power" and the importance of persuasion and a proactive approach in working for the greater good of the South Side.

The idea of technology transfer, of using research data to drive social reform in the immediate vicinity of the University, is a powerful one, and stands at the root of modern Progressivism and of the Chicago School of Sociology.

But for a vision worthy of the University as resident of an "emerging global city" imagined so compellingly by Daniel Burnham a century ago, we would suggest more than that: a set of guiding principles outlining the role the University intends to play in its engagement with the major issues that affect Hyde Park's livability. Where are we going to be in 5 years, 10 years, and how will we be working with the University to get there?

Such a set of principles would help the University shed any temptation to revert to a siege mentality, and automatically invite positive participation in a broader discussion in a way that only large-scale visions, like the Olympics, can do.

I'll Trade You 1 Gropius Campus for 2 Mediocre Pre-War Hospital Buildings

posted by chicago pop

You win some, you lose some. In Hyde Park, we won this:

(Source: Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/photo/2008-05/38685199.jpg)

At the site of Michael Reese Hospital at the northern edge of Bronzeville, we're going to lose this:

(Source for beautiful pic: the blog Time Tells
http://vincemichael.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/mrh-kaplan-angls.jpg)

And this:

(Source: David Schalliol, The Chicago Reader
http://www.chicagoreader.com/michael_reese_hospital/)

And even the power plant, which is an homage to a similar one by Mies van der Rohe at the IIT campus, and manages to give a remarkable aesthetic interpretation to an utterly functional structure:

(Source: Gropius in Chicago Coalition
http://www.savemrh.com/works)

All of which are far, far cooler (and, yes, more historically and architecturally significant...) than what we started with, and spent so much time arguing about last fall, which was this:


So there you have, in pictures, the irony of preservation in Chicago. We save nondescript and inexplicably "significant" hospital structures by the firm of Schmidt, Garden & Martin, such as the one above and a similar structure at the site of the now defunct Michael Reese Hospital. And we destroy the unquestionably accomplished designs and internationally significant structures of Walter Gropius at the same location.

For the bare bones of the story, go to the Gropius in Chicago website, which inventories the structures and the plans for a massive residential housing complex planned for the area as part of Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics.

The ironies in this story are many. With regards to the tale of two hospitals that have engaged the energies of Hyde Park's favorite band of preservationists, the case for the significance -- in any sense -- of the Doctors Hospital on Stony Island was never compelling, whereas the case for the significance of the Gropius structures is undeniable, and has only gotten stronger in light of recent research.

With regards to the economic benefits of demolition, Hyde Park's Doctors Hospital was a sure thing, in terms of a deal with a solvent private company, in terms of the jobs it would have provided to an impoverished part of the city at the onset of a major recession, and the benefits its activity would have generated for safety, liveliness, and neighborhood commerce.

Demolition of the Gropius Campus, on the other hand -- together with almost all the rest of Michael Reese Hospital -- will be paid for by the City of Chicago, to the tune of $85 million, in addition to the $500 million already pledged by the City (with a current budget shortfall of $469 million), and $250 million by the State of Illinois (with a current budget shortfall of $11.5 billion) to back Chicago's Olympic bid.

The ironies extend further out: the design of the Olympic Village has been overseen by Chicago's grande dame of architecture firms, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, which will go down in history as the firm which did the most to make the visionary sketches and plans of the interwar Bauhaus movement, founded by Walter Gropius, a physical reality in the United States of America.

How ironic that SOM's Olympic Village would be built on the ruins of a hospital campus designed by the firm's architectural progenitor.

Such irreverance, of course, is precisely the sin for which much of the modernist planning of the post-war period is today condemned. Thinking along these lines, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin asks in an editorial if we have forgotten, in the case of Reese Hospital, the lessons of urban renewal, and its "erase and replace" approach to urban planning.

The funny thing is, preserving the Gropius campus would be preserving a clutch of notable modernist buildings by an internationally significant architect, but it would also be preserving the relics of one of the most massive post-war episodes of urban land clearance in Chicago, of exactly the sort that Kamin objects to.

While there was, until recently, a plaque to Gropius at Reese, to my knowledge there is no plaque to the land clearance that facilitated the erection of his buildings.

By saving the Gropius campus, we'd be saving something that destroyed something else, in the name of ideals of urban planning that are now almost universally discredited. We like the buildings now, but not the conceptual boxes they came in.

That doesn't mean the Gropius Reese Hospital buildings shouldn't be saved; it just underlines the very wooly nature of preservationism as an intellectual project.

As for the irony of its outcomes -- preserved Doctors Hospital, demolished Gropius campus -- the pictures above say it all.

Sack the Bags

posted by Richard Gill

It's time to end the epidemic of plastic bags that are caught in trees, bushes, fences, you name it. Anything that stands vertically and is permeable to the wind will readily snag a bag and hold onto it just about forever. Every time I pick a plastic bag off the ground, I figure I kept it out of a tree. Any pool of water, or pond will hold plastic bags like glue.

It's awful to look at, is dangerous to animals, signifies waste, and uses petroleum. Take a ride downtown on Metra Electric and see the astounding display of plastic bags all over the margins of the right-of-way, especially the forested east side. It will get worse during the summer, when people take a flimsy single-use bag for, say, a bottle of soda and then discard it as soon as they're out the door.

Some cities in the U.S., notably San Francisco, have enacted various levels of restrictions or outright bans on plastic bags at retail stores. A growing number of countries in Europe, Africa and Asia are addressing the problem. Despite fear-mongering by merchants, the laws have not put their businesses in the toilet, nor have they somehow been detrimental to their customers.

I learned a lot at the site:

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89135360

There are viable substitute materials with much longer useful lives, even compostable plastic bags. Programs to distribute and encourage the use of canvas and cloth bags have been successful.

Plastic bag recycling efforts seem to be woefully inadequate, and anti-littering laws don't cut it.

I wrote to Alderman Hairston about this problem. The mayor, for all his caring about urban beautification, has said little or nothing about the plastic bag invasion. The Chicago City Council should act on this matter before the entire city turns into an orgy of flying, fluttering, flapping, flimsy, filthy plastic.

The Blue Gargoyle Closes Its Doors

posted by Elizabeth Fama

On Wednesday evening (4/8/09) last week, the Blue Gargoyle (5638 S. Woodlawn Ave.) closed its doors. It had been struggling for the past several months with financial problems. In their last days there, staff members and tutors worked to place their students in alternative programs around the city.

Literacy on the South Side

While there are no specific data about literacy rates in Chicago, the 2000 census and 2005 census estimate do report education attainment levels (unfortunately, a high school diploma is not a guarantee of literacy). In two neighborhoods adjacent to Hyde Park (Woodlawn and Bronzeville), about 1 in 10 adults over age twenty-five never made it to 9th grade, and about a third never graduated from high school. The WBEZ series 50-50: The Odds of Graduating reports that barely 1/3 of current students at Robeson High School are on track to graduate.

Why the Blue Gargoyle was Unique

Blue Gargoyle offered day and evening classes in literacy and GED, one-on-one tutoring in a welcoming environment, and counseling services for individuals and families, all under one roof. There was a family literacy program, where parents pursued their GED classes and tutoring, while their infants, toddlers, and young children participated in early childhood education. Parents learned not only how to read to kids, but why it was important.

A young mother reads to her daughter at the Blue Gargoyle

A Bridge Between Communities

The Blue Gargoyle had a clearly defined mission -- one that I think is important for a neighborhood that blends a wealthier, intellectual community with a poorer community that is struggling with inadequate public schools. That's a loss for Hyde Park, and also for the University. Many of the volunteers were local professionals "giving back," and college and graduate students who got teaching and professional experience (along with a warm rapport with their students) by working there. Many of the counselors were Social Service Administration (SSA) students on internship.

Award Winning

The Illinois Secretary of State (who is also the State Librarian) gives out ten Spotlight Awards for outstanding literacy students and tutors. Blue Gargoyle students and tutors received between one and three of these nearly every year.

2008 Spotlight winners Mike Dellar (left) and Paul Strauss.

(Thanks to Betsy Rubin for chatting about the Blue Gargoyle and adult literacy with me. Betsy is the Adult and Family Literacy Specialist at Literacy Works Chicago.)

Vacation Notice

HPP is going to spend a little time with family. See you in a week or so.

Tempest in a Compost Pile: The Garden at 61st Street

posted by chicago pop

Short Version of Post

For those of you pressed for time, the short version of this post, dealing with the diplomatic kerfuffle over the destiny of the community garden at the northeast corner of 61st and Dorchester, can be reduced to the following three statements:

1. The University of Chicago owns the land.
2. The people currently using the land as a garden do not own it.
3. Anyone other than the University making use of the land in question is a squatter, tolerated by the good graces of the true owner, and unless they have had the foresight to prepare for the day when the true owner would assert rights over the land (by either bidding to buy the land themselves, or seeking to buy property elsewhere), these folks are SOL, no matter how well-intentioned they are, nor how much you or I might like the vegetables they produce and the ideas behind what they're doing.
   

Long Version of Post

To reprise the story in its bare essentials: for about 10 years, people have grown accustomed to gardening on a plot of land, owned by the University of Chicago, directly to the north of the local institution known as the Experimental Station.

The Experimental Station, it will be noted, owns its land, a parcel on the southeast corner of Dorchester and 61st Street.

About the same time (1999), the University began the planning for what would emerge between 2002-2005 as its ambitious South Campus Plan, intended to satisfy the need for facilities expansion, but also to create a more welcoming and porous border between the University and the Woodlawn neighborhood south of the Midway.

In materials presented at community meetings in 2004, the land currently used as the community garden was clearly identified to be University property, and included within the boundaries of the South Campus project.

These are the kinds of signs in the wind that suggest what is likely to happen in the near future. There should have been no surprise, then, when in the spring of 2008, the University informed 61st Street gardeners that the University's consent to allow gardening was temporary; nor should there have been further surprise when, a year later, the University announced that the 2009 growing season would be the last one for gardening on the property.

What makes this story more interesting is the fact that it has not, and does not fit easily into the archetypal narrative of town-gown, little people-Big Institution conflict that grew up in the 1960s and has flourished ever since, liberally watered by the editorials of the Hyde Park Herald and richly cultivated by outspoken neighborhood activists.

The University's decision to reclaim the garden is driven by its plans to relocate the Chicago Theological Seminary from its historic location at 58th and University to land adjacent to the garden. According to a statement on the CTS's website, the University is performing a massive act of philanthropy by not only preserving and refurbishing the old and much-loved CTS building, but by erecting a new home for the seminary -- furniture included -- for free.

The new facility was made possible through a multifaceted agreement with the University of Chicago. Under the agreement, the university will purchase the existing CTS buildings and construct and furnish new facilities to the seminary's specifications. The total cost of the purchase and construction, including contingencies, moving costs, furniture and incidentals will be as much as $44 million. CTS will hold a 100-year lease on the new building at a rental rate of $1 annually.

If the University had not "saved" the Chicago Theological Seminary, the 61st Street garden might not need to be shut down. It would be nice if this were not the case, but even among the most worthwhile elements of the most progressive agenda, there are occasionally trade-offs, and this appears to be one of them.

Yet this outcome is rather curious, in light of certain garden advocates' self-understanding of just what it is they're up to. In a recent post on Huffington Post Chicago, Jamie Kalven makes a 2,000 word case for why the planning for relocating CTS to South Campus should accommodate the garden. There he argues that:

the constellation of community garden, farmers' market, wood-fired bread oven, and cafe has established the conditions for an active inquiry into the practical requirements of sustainable local food systems. [italics added]

And further:

In this time of economic distress and uncertainty, of massive dislocations and strenuous adaptations, this ongoing investigation will yield knowledge with direct implications for public policy. [italics added]

One wonders if one of the basic requirements of sustainable local food systems is not having the experiment aborted as soon as the landlord kicks you off. That's not very practical, it's certainly not sustainable, nor does it appear to recommend itself as a good policy precedent.

A lot of us like to garden, and buy organics and locally produced food. A lot of us are already convinced that industrialized agriculture in the United States is a deeply flawed and unsustainable system. It is petroleum, water, and chemical-input intensive and has a high carbon footprint; it is genetically disadvantageous for the local ecosystems in which monocultures are cultivated, the nutritional content of the food supply, and ever more scarce supplies of fresh water; and it is part of a system of food manufacture and distribution that is partially responsible for exploding health problems such as obesity and diabetes.

A lot of people already recognize these problems, and have some sense of what partial solutions might be. Local food production is one of them. And as with a lot of alternatives, whether they be technologies like battery or fuel cell powered automobiles, organic farming, or solar power, the trick is to get replicability and scalability -- that is to say, to make the trick you pull off on a plot of land in Hyde Park something that can be done in neighborhoods across the country to potentially feed millions of people, thereby scaling it up to the point where it will have real-world impact.

It would seem a major piece of this effort, if it is to have real-world implications at all, is taking seriously the idea that the first thing you need to do is to buy the land you cultivate. Then no one can boot you off, you don't have to persuade landowners with essays on spiritualistic metaphysics or attempt to guilt-trip the University. Then you can get on with the practical business of replicating and scaling up your "investigations."

That kind of experiment, it seems to me, would be truly putting your money where your mouth is.

Grooming for the IOC at MSI

posted by richard gill

Mysterious Mega-Tent on Lawn of the Museum of Science and Industry

Isn't it nice, how there are city crews scurrying all over the park around the Museum of Science and Industry this morning (April 2), trimming trees, sweeping up litter, raking the grass around the curb lines, and even manicuring the beach? And I notice that the plastic bags have miraculously disappeared from the trees. And that huge fancy event tent that's been a-building for nearly a whole month has supply and catering trucks all around it. Normally, those big party tents are set up and taken down within a week; this one must be VERY special.

Maybe the International Olympics Committee is coming around. Y'think? Nah, it's just a coincidence of timing, especially that the beaches are getting smoothed almost three months before they officially open.

Smoothing the Sand at 57th Street Beach

I wonder how much this is costing us. If the Olympics come to Chicago, cronyism and corruption will pole-vault to new heights. We will all pay for it. Any other city that wants the Olympics can have it, in my opinion. Maybe Rio can deal with it.