Breezy
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Isn’t this the best time of the week, Friday afternoon and it’s all ahead.
Leave the rest behind, that was Thursday. Waiting for that week-end bus to Saturday. Buses like elephants in a parade, here’s your number, climb aboard, what’s next, who knows!
Gold Coast Plunder
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Here’s what’s left of a Historic Landmark House in the Gold Coast.
Here’s the debris of history wrapped up in a big blue piece of plastic like the City of Chicago blue recycling bags. When we see history here it hides the money we see behind. When we see history in Chicago we say take out the trash and let’s make some cash. Recycle the old into the new (cash flow).
What have the new owners of this building done to their historic Gold Coast purchase? What are they up to? Hard to tell. But if you stop moving and stand on the sidewalk in front of it, sooner or later a breeze pushes the blue tarp away to reveal no house behind. It would seem the house behind the facade has been knocked mostly down. We lost some history there.
According to the March edition (link below) of the excellent Chicago Architecture Blog, as much as 40% of a landmarked structure might be removed and Chicago Landmarks Commission can and allow the project .
The article runs photographs of what’s left behind the facade, pictures taken by “a concerned neighbor.” This recent blog entry reports the new owner plans to turn the 3-story family home into a 7 story structure with roof deck by the time he’s finished. For photos of the Augustus Warner House when it was whole, search it by name on-line and look at the Flickr link and Pinterest pins.
When you read the founding ordinance for the Historic Landmarks Commission and attend the public proceedings, you might get the cozy feeling that the part of our past will always belong in the future. This blue tarp is the proof that good policy can fail to produce good practice. It is an event to demoralize the civic spirit and that, history tells us, is never a good thing.
Additional Sources:
Here’s a March 2014 report of the status of this Historic Landmark Chicago house from The Chicago Architecture Blog (highly recommended):
http://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2014/03/26/status-update-warner-house-reconstruction/
Lacing News
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Here’s a good argument for vacant lots, older buildings and ghost signs.
Along South Michigan Avenue in Chicago we look up and see “Wear Gossard Corsets, They Lace in Front.” Never noticed that before. What did it mean? How modern was it? What other questions does this ghost sign raise about the world, the ladies and gentlemen and the corsets in the last years of the corset.
Today’s column includes links to two Gossard newspaper ads from 1913 and 1915. The illustrated advertisements tease lady readers with lowered prices, $3.50 to $20, including fitting. They promise the comfort of a natural waistline with the allure of revealing “the lines of the figure.”
According to the Gossard Company, Mr. Gossard went to Paris and had his “epiphany” discovering the full-figured Sarah Bernhardt before and after corseting. In 1901 he left the dressmaking trade and opened his corset company, in Chicago.
By the on-line circa World War adverts we see, the corset was fighting for its life as more women flirted with the unfettered feel of modern underwear. Corsets promised to give the best of both worlds, the Victorian engineered female body in stays and the modern liberated female body that, all knew, might be comfortably shapeless and ultimately wanting more of a “narration.”
We wonder about the front lacing feature, what was its attraction? The owner-operator had quicker access, quicker comfort, perhaps after a meal? Or the wearer could now lace herself in the absence of servants and a dwindling domestic class. The 1915 ad, during World War I but before U.S. entry into that war, mentions a volatile American fashion industry that had freed itself from Europe, possibly because of the re-direction of manufacturing in Europe, from corsets to weapons.
Our point today is not to dissert on corsets, as snappy a topic as it is. Our point is to sing out for our cities that manage to preserve the old building stock. These old brick walls transmit messages, messages from the past. Through the questions they give us, we get closer to time past. Just asking and knowing we don’t know, we are closer.
All of this as we hurry down the street, late to a meeting.
Additional Sources:
The Spokane Daily Chronicle Gossard ad from Thursday, October 9, 1913:
The Dry Goods Reporter, January 2, 1915:
From the Gossard Company’s current website, the pictorial timeline of their Heritage in fine underwear:
http://www.gossardusa.com/About-Gossard/Heritage
Google Gossard Corsets and fall into the “rabbit hole” of scholarly interest in the subject. Don’t miss the bound edition of The Farm Journal (on Amazon) where Gossard corset adds promise to “end corset worries” such as pushing the bosom up too much or the deadlier danger of snapping metal and bone (the whale’s not the wearer’s).
Now Google Gossard Corsets again to find Upper Peninsula’s Marquette Monthly (from March, 2005) and Erin Elliott’s whale of a Gossard corset story.
Just be careful because you can’t just visit corsets, you’ll want a stay (there’s a Corset Pinterest link in there). This column might have a sequel if more corsetry is forthcoming.
Late Afternoon in Uptown
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We had a place to be and people to see so we came to Uptown. But plenty of times this reporter just hops a Red Line to be in Uptown a while.
It’s been the haven to Appalachia looking for work, to American Indians whose reservations disappeared under them, to any number of people in need of a place to be and not be bothered for a while. Uptown has been the place to try to keep it together or watch things fall apart.
In Chicago, Uptown has been one of those neighborhoods where everyone’s welcome for a while or a life. It has some of the most beautiful houses and apartment buildings in town and significant history, including the landmarked Dover Historic District. Everybody’s welcome.
Now hungry eyes are watching it and twitching like a cat ready to pounce. Money and developers and tax districts want territory.
So we’re spending more time than usual in Uptown these days, some of us. As if by walking on its sidewalks and looking hard at everything we could help keep it together.
Alexander Calder for Hope
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Today is our most uneasy holiday of all, Memorial Day.
Some say we should apologize to the veterans for sending them into harm. Some say, no, thank them for “their service.” Some say we should dedicate ourselves to preventing war from happening again and we should make it up to vets for everything that happened to them. Some say not much at all.
Our culture likes to celebrate and not apologize and so today’s a national holiday and an overworked and underemployed polity embraces it. We need a good time and we’re taking it today!
Primary Source prefers this holiday be Labor Day. If our culture denies May 1/ May Day/ Haymarket for a labor festival, then have that party this week-end. That would be something festive as we relax towards summer. Make our annual national apology to veterans and remembrance of tragedy another day of the year. Or the rest of the year.
Additional Sources:
–Today’s Chicago Tribune ran columnist Dawn Turner Trice’s excellent survey of veteran art exhibits up in Chicago. The National Veterans’ Art Museum has opened their new show, “Surrealism and War” (4041 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago).
-Jon Stewart’s show assembled a stunning video montage suggesting U.S. government neglect of its veterans from the Revolutionary War to the Present. Particularly noteworthy: their footage of the 1933 “Bonus Army” of World War I vets trying to collect the small bonus Congress promised them back in the war. In the depths of the Depression, the Bonus Army vets were expelled from Washington, DC by a pair of army up and comers, Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, at the head of federal troops.
-Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. He composed this melancholic piece as world and friends were disappearing into the Great War. Here’s the link, it’s complete, a little over 24 minutes, there’s an ad at the start, just try to ignore it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkt8T38aaMw
The Rumble of the Riders
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Walk around under the elevated train tracks between Belmont and Wrigley Field (Addison stop) in Chicago and you experience a hidden realm of muffled trains overhead, birds moving into the lush springtime of neighborhood trees and bushes and the quiet mutterings of neighborhood people with dogs on strings and friends inside hand-held devices.
The train tracks and train rumble become part of a particular neighborhood ecology. If you short cut through that place just to get from here to there, block it out, day dream past it, it’s nothing special.
But walk under the tracks to see how it works, how things fit together, fences, buildings, parked cars, loading docks, fauna, garbage cans, sights, sounds, smells, then you discover a distinctive place that is still the hidden backside of a city that mixes. Not just one class; not just one version of technology; not just one shoe size.
It’s a good place to come and think about our cities as some in them assume their class will end up owning the whole thing. If that ever happened (is it even possible?) then what they’d be left holding would no longer be a city. It would just be a whopping big suburb of an impoverished imagination. The “Belmont Bypass” campaign by Chicago’s transit authority and City Hall are just the latest attempt to move the larger urban standardization project along.
Zones
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Saturday and Sunday are the calendar equivalents of life beneath the tracks and so today and tomorrow Primary Source is running fresh snaps of some of what we ride over when the Brown Line el leaves Belmont Station.
In some cities, here Chicago, we are lucky to have miles of elevated train tracks. They are massively material. They weigh heavily on our landscapes, reminding us that humans had to somehow get all that stuff up there so we can then climb aboard and fly around above the city.
The world under the El changes by neighborhood. Just now in Chicago, life along a particular stretch of Brown Line track is endangered and causing us to review how important the El is to our civic imagination and the ways we connect with each other. The City wants to make a “flyover” that would rise in the air with the train wrapped in a tube. At least sixteen buildings would be razed to make way for a more sanitized version of per-square-foot profitability. In this world the alley rats would no doubt be replaced by alley minks, they bite but oh they’re soft.
Primary Source loves a good alley and even more so a great timber and steel alley with elevated tracks rising above the blue recycling bins and “Target Rats!” signs. When the El goes rattling overhead it’s the soundtrack to our endless urban movie of past and present.
Tomorrow Part II of our Beneath the Tracks photo essay. Please come back. We promise no rats -not in these alleys any way-and so far no minks either.
northbound rush hour Brown Line, at that famous curve where the purported 4-minute delay (City Hall) or several second delay (numerous riders with stop watches), where Brown Line stops to let Red Line pass…our train sat 4 minutes (dang, was the mayor right?) but no Red Line ever came. Once we’d paid our 4 minute- fine for daring to time the thing, our driver proceeded north.
CTA’s Selling…but no one’s buying
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Sometimes a panorama is the best way to tell the story.
This is half the room at the Addison 19th District Police Station in Chicago last night. What was advertised was, admittedly, unclear, after all what’s an “open house meeting?” Was it an open house (fun for the whole family, try the handcuffs) or a meeting? Shouldn’t an open house have food? Shouldn’t a meeting have shouting? No food and at least while this reporter was on the premises, no shouting, just quantities of earnest, worried looking CTA rank and file, just-out-of -college workers. Wasn’t a career in public transportation supposed to involve a more grateful public?
There were ranks of CTA poster boards that proved a+b and ipso facto that their proposed $320 Million “red line purple line “flyover” project, known in civic circles as the “Belmont Bypass” would be grand.
CTA just wants to tear out 16 parcels of commercial and residential real estate (remember Belmont isn’t far from Wrigley Field and at least one of the CTA destroyables is a bar). In exchange for land CTA promises rush hour commutes will be seconds shorter every single day.
The story that leaks around the original time-saving rationale is that high price condo buildings could then replace all the more modestly priced buildings currently along this particular strip of elevated track. What the mayor and CTA seem to anticipate is a golden horde of wealthy 20-somethings burning their global start-up pay to buy or rent over the elevated train.
Which would be good for the groundlings of Chicago because presumably these wealthy techies would pay massive amounts of tax. Since our system has a record of finding ways to minimize tax bruising of the wealthy, there’s more than a little magical thinking here. Of course without magical thinking there would be no politics and if Chicago had no politics, we might all move away. Tax base goes bye-bye.
As for last night’s town hall-meeting, we went for a meeting and didn’t get one. What we did get though came from the neighborhood the CTA/City Hall demolition project would seriously disrupt.
As we hopped out of the Belmont train, to walk under the tracks to the Addison meeting place, we ran into a long, happy line of all kinds of people waiting with a patience that means there’s food at the other end and it’s all free. Half-dozen Italian restaurants were serving free bites of their signature dishes to anyone hungry. They did it for about two-hours. It was gracious, generous, jolly and in this current Depression, a mighty welcome thing to run into on your way home or into what you thought was a meeting to try to keep this neighborhood as funky and sweet as it is.
Additional Sources:
There’s an e-mail address for anyone who wants to know when the meetings are. They were passing this out last night:
3200nwiltonblk@gmail.com
They’ve got a facebook page as well.
This is something for the whole city to follow. We don’t live in that neighborhood and we spoke with people last night who didn’t either. But we all claim the Belmont area for our own to protect. It’s probably the hot heart of Chicago.
No Goodbyes
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Distress and missed opportunity! We all knew the 200 south block of State Street was in tumult, construction and scaffolding, signs on scaffolding that the stores would remain open for business during the chaos and now today Roberto’s is gone. Just the sign on their beautiful curved display glass: they’re in Homewood.
All that style, those colors, the beautifully cut and draped suits and the shoes! They looked a lot like the zoot suits, extravagant, flamboyant, but Roberto’s clothing was also something an active man could wear gracefully. For men and little boys, satin grey and black 3-pieces, the yellow glad to be alive and styling ensembles, the this is who I am, deal with it, fashions that were Roberto’s, all gone now from downtown Chicago.
If you spent part of your days along State Street you were likely to walk past Roberto’s store and likely also to be treated to their trademark, the permanent sidewalk fashion show.
In this reporter’s early years here the Roberto Man was elegant, handsome young man, the kind of man clothes were cut for, and every day he modeled a different Roberto’s ensemble for everyone on State Street. In recent years the Resident Roberto was an equally elegant older man who proved to us every day that age was no deterrent to joie de vivre and urban theatricality… step inside to Roberto’s.
Now they’ve left us. We don’t know why. All over town the price of a lease is being driven up by a lusty appetite for different kinds of dollars. Or it might have been other reasons altogether. We don’t know. We just regret.
State Street and downtown Chicago have become substantially less than they were. We’re taking a big hit here.
Additional Sources:
We found no substantial Internet information about Roberto’s departure from State Street and concentration on its Homewood (suburban) men and boy’s clothing store, but here are some loving photographs by Roberto’s fans from Yelp postings:
Dark Canyons
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Side streets are where the urban allure is. And they are streets we don’t really look at – just glimpse them as we look both ways before we cross. But it’s the side streets that take off into the setting sun and carry miles of blocks and buildings out across the Prairie. At our latitude and longitude, this reporter likes to look down side streets about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, when side street canyons fill with shadow that makes the streetlights glow.
Helping You Adapt to Life in France
Research and discussion on the history and peoples of the area
thoughts from the forest
to historians of the here and now
An Alternative Cultural Daybook
Architecture/Planning.com site
Reduce, reuse, recycle - the sustainable design style
...changing ideas about aging!
Candy in U.S. Culture and History
PRIMARY SOURCE 