DOWNTOWN DOUBLE CROSS

Thanks to Primary Source reader Barbara B. here’s the link to excellent DNA Chicago coverage of the PNC Bank shack in Chicago’s Grant Park.  Their company man told this reporter last Friday they would be gone by Monday but look at what PNC actually did in this link:

http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20140630/loop/pnc-pop-up-bank-grant-park-draws-ire-of-parks-group-but-stay-lengthens?utm_source=Chicago&utm_campaign=c763c2609e-Mailchimp-CHI&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4061d3bea7-c763c2609e-173935221

Basically PNC Bank has decided not to leave Grant Park today and move to North Avenue Beach for the rest of the summer, as they had promised.  

They now say they’ll stay right where they are in Grant Park because public response has been so positive.  Primary Source wonders who they are talking to.  This DNA Chicago link is a good interview collection, including a statement from Grant Park Conservancy’s own Bob O’Neill who has reliably

done his job and approved the Chicago Park District’s decision to collect money any way it can by renting out parts and parcels of the park during the only season of the year it’s really used.  

According to the DNA O’Neill quote, the Park District collects $120,000 for allowing the PNC shanty to stay in Grant Park, always a good thing in O’Neill’s book.  PNC rent is apparently excellent fertilizer for the grass and the trees.  Good to know.  Next time we want to picnic in Grant Park we’ll take comfort in the fact that we’re not sitting in Canadian goose crap.  It’s cash greenbacks.

LOSE/ADVANCE SPECTATOR SPORT

US v. Germany, Grant Park, Chicago
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To be sure ’twas a day of slipped meanings.  First chill and foggy then clear and broiling.  All of us hemmed inside the chain link fence, wrapped with that “One nation one team” sign, wrapped in Old Glories, wrapped in the sudden sweating and all the water snatched by the coppers at the gates.  Slipped meanings, Yanks lose 0-1 and “advance” in the World Cup.  Germany actually wins and advances like the losers.  None of this mattered.

They came to watch this game.  And here’s what:  they watched it, that’s all they did, just the one thing, watching the game.  They were still looking at a screen but in that big crowd no texting, no scrolling, no photos, no selfies, and, it seemed, not a lot of tweeting.  All eyes front, all bodies taut, straight, ramrod, how else can we say it the whole crowd looking like athletes.  

Which takes us back to one of this week’s events, a local Chicago college (Robert Morris University) is currently looking for “e-athletes”, video gamers of a certain persuasion, to compete in high-stake (video) game competitions.  Right now it looks like athletic scholarships will be available for the e-thletes, dollars that until this week were reserved for people who literally, realistically, used their actual bodies against other people.  

Right now it’s looking like a question for biochemists and philosophers to solve.  What constitutes “reality?” Are the chemicals of metabolism (like those produced during video game competition) equal ($) to muscle and bone production in “traditional” athletics.

Back to Butler Field in Grant Park.  The people watching that screen sure looked like past or present soccer/football players.  Whatever their age they watched with an odd intensity of people whose bodies understood everything on the screen.  They were spectators in a physical way in a field on a blazing day with the big screen up against the Chicago skyline. 

BEAUX ARTS MONEY SHACK

PNC BANK COLONIZES GRANT PARK CHICAGO (5.26.14)
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The country we like to call God Bless America had just lost 0-1 to Germany in soccer/football.  All the Old Glory clothing in Grant Park (for the jumbotronning of the match) was at half-mast.  Soccer fans momentarily stopped drinking free cups of something from unmarked cans handed to them by strangers outside the fenced viewing area.  A somber cloud drifted over Grant Park.

The walk home through Chicago’s central beaux arts park was a way to make sense of loss.  A walk in the park can be a good thing when we want to make sense of life.  

This walk reminded your Primary Source reporter that PNC Bank’s money shack was still there after all these weeks, blocking the little pedestrian bridge that leads weary citizens from Michigan Avenue into the cool relief of their park.  

Money and banks are symbolic and a good symbol gets better if it  also physically blocks an architectural perspective.  PNC gives us The bank saying “In Your Face Chicago.”  Thank you, PNC.

To re-cap this particular walk in the park, your reporter went from

1)a tightly securitized big screen world cup viewing area around the Petrillo Bandshel (tarp-covered chain link fence, confiscated water bottles on a very hot day and no visible water distribution or sale within the area of confinement)…

2) past the grant Buckingham Fountain area that was similarly fenced with private event tents in it

To walk through and out of Grant Park

3) around the PNC Bank Money Shack at the end of the footbridge to Michigan Avenue and next to the Summer Dance space.  

The “public space” of a “public” park is less and less public and the space more and more privatized.

To be fair, PNC has given Chicagoans a month-long treat of their banking shanty, perhaps its own homage to the Great Depression of the 1930s that turned so many city parks and neighborhoods into shantytowns.   

Yesterday Primary Source was delighted to find an actual PNC employee in the shack with his colleague.  He was a loyal company man and did his best to defend his employer’s excellent products.  

The company man had more difficulty with basic questions like this one, “Why on earth would someone simply want to enjoy the park on a summer’s day?  Why wouldn’t they prefer to do their banking in there?”  

Two good things about the PNC shanty bank:

1)  They’ll be gone on Monday-off to spend the rest of the summer on North Avenue Beach – surf’s up, rate’s up! Northsiders be warned.  

2) The shanty has riled up the neighborhood around the Grant Park PNC bank shack.  At least one Michigan Avenue activist has gotten lame duck aldermanic staff promise to look into it. South Loop Chicago treasure, reporter-blogger Bonnie McGrath, identified community outrage at the shack in the beaux arts park in her June 20th column (Dearborn Express).

Oh, and here’s a third good thing:

3)  This just reminds us -in the teeth of a biting “recession” the banking industry had so much to do with – that banks are what they always have been.  PNC Bank’s ill-considered “public relations” stunt is the pure shack proof of that.  

If they didn’t think through public reaction, it might it be because they don’t think they have to.  After all, who’s got the money?  They do.   

 

 

WHAT THEY SEE

Vertical clouds
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If we had six or seven hundred things called “k’s” to hand over to strangers, here’s what we’d see.

If you got the view that got blocked by the last building up and if you were close enough to the lake to be the first to get the days’ lake effect, what you might see most of the time would be someone in that other building standing over there looking at you looking at them.  

If you were lucky, they might be eating dinner and you’d get an idea for a new dish.  Or they might not have curtains.  Or you might have to get curtains when, one evening, you catch the flash of the setting western sun in their high power binoculars.  

All of this would be most of the time and some of the things people decide to live with.  

And then on days like this week’s days, with fog ripping around the lakefront high rises and dissolving before it gets to the rest of us, you might see this rushing past your window.  Then you’d realize there was a precise distance between your buildings, a specific angle of a curve to your building that forced the fog into an architectural sieve and boiled it past your balcony and windows and brought anyone who’s home to their windows to just look at the fog rush by and not even see each other.  

I’m just making this up.  But it could happen.  Only I don’t know anyone up there and can’t ring their bell and ask to go look out their window to check.

HOW THINGS WORK

A Skyfull
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Where they are used to be something but we forget what that was.  Then it was nothing, I remember that.  Then it was a hole.  Then there was a sign:  “From the low 200’s”.  Now these guys are up there and when they see a crane swinging big pieces at them they know what to do.  This is Chicago, “the City that Works.”

EVIDENCE-BASED LAUNDRY

Exhibit A
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Archaeology of Daily Life.  Instagram/Pinterest/Tweety o facebook o mine.  All of this has left us unsure of how to contact each other.  “Does she still read e-mails?  What was it she said…?  Tired of facebook only tweeting or was it texting?  Should I use the contact button on her website?  Who does websites in this day and age?” etc. and cetera.  Certainly don’t try to telephone, “he only looks at texts” or was that just last week?  All the sludge of unconversed conversations piling up in all the social media that no one will ever know was there.  “I don’t get it.  They just stopped writing.”  

In this reporter’s apartment building we have what transcends technology.  It is the uber tech of first and last resort, it never breaks and sooner or later we always look.  It is our Bulletin Board.  In our building our Bulletin Board is in the laundry room, the room of inevitability.  

We are a community that has known pitched condo battles and years’ long elevator snubs.  This has made us disciplined, determined not to go lightly to war against each other.  But every decade or so someone new to collective living wants to play with politics , makes it to the condo board and from that august position commences to make mischief.  

Factions are organizing now over what was resolved so long ago:  how big is too big for an inner city elevator dog.  Many years and many dogs back our building negotiated a weight limit and, what we believed to be a durable peace, was signed.  That peace has proven a mere truce.   Recruitment to Big Dog or Little Dog party rages through the building.  Primary Source cares not about canine girth.  If you’ve ever met the right dog, inter-species passions are understandable.  

It’s the Laundry Room Bulletin Board that interests Primary Source and today we share with our readers the mystery of the latest volley of doggerel.   Top page presents the case of the Welter Weight Dog faction (max. 40lbs, “grandfather” big puppies that will exceed it).  Lower page makes counter claims for unrestricted dog weights.  

The mysterious part for this reporter is the two Post-Its to the right, with a floral/American Flag Rampant design.  Flowers and flag  post-it scolds  Small Doggers for insufficient evidence.  “Support argument with more than two” pieces of evidence!”   Or what?  The rest of their chide suggests the writer might be a teacher of some kind.  (Sound of plot thickening).  Teacher of what to whom?  And how long have people with American flags on a field of violets printed on their writing paper been heavy into evidence-based laundry?  This reporter knows everyone in the building and has no firm idea of who might have owned this paper and written those notes.  Neighbors are never done getting to know each other.  

But what this reporter most wants to know is, if your clothes are done, can I use that big dryer?

 

UN-DO-RE-DO, BUFFALO

 

Buffalo, New York.  “Queen City” wants to reverse the decades-long population loss that puts it at a little over quarter of a million people now.   Downtown office lease signings are, for the moment, front page news and for good reason.  

Even on the shortest possible visit you’ll be likely to hear that Buffalo and its good people want company.  It’s the only place this reporter has been made to feel truly welcome, as in, move here, we want you.  That feeling of being welcomed by strangers is a confusing pleasure.

Thank you for it, Buffalo.  And in friendship this suggestion:  do make Buffalo glow again but don’t make the mistakes that Chicago and San Francisco are making.  Don’t squander your energy and invention by handing your work and your town over to the tech industry and their fierce kitten army of start-ups.  

Of course they’re cute and they seem to promise to spend and overspend: $20 martinis, half-million dollar studio apartments.  But please, dear Buffalo, don’t surrender municipal regulatory powers to bring in the Uber app as your own people are exploited to drive and pay for their own cars to build some billionaire’s portfolio.  An Uberless city is unappealing to techies.  Remember what the tech talent on that crowded San Francisco bus said last summer:  “I really don’t understand why they don’t  just Uber to work!”

Last week Chicago held its annual 3-day Neocon design conference at the Merchandise Mart.  Neocon keynotes have a practice of delivering seminal ideas.  One of them, Tom Eich, an engineer and product designer for ideo.com,  spoke with a certain amount of swagger about the work his company has been doing to free generally tech-centric businesses from the inconvenience and expense of  “place.”  

Mr. Eich made his presentation with what, outside of Manhattan, could be called a sneer.  His braggadocio was actually a dense collection of evidence in support of  his argument that even the google campus and Apple campus might one day be ghost towns.  This would happen because the “talent” – tech rhetoric for tech workers – will not be interested in commuting to a “place” – this word sneered.  If Eich is describing anything “real”  then all the “places” that make themselves over to please the tech industry may be left with newly scrambled economies.

If Chicago’s current courtship of all things start-up begins to fail  we can retrieve our collective memory of half-finished high-rises, covered in snow, ragged construction tarps flapping in the high winds.   The big schemes of more high rise offices, more high rise luxury condos buried beneath a civic stoicism, best not spoken of.  That was our skyline, best not spoken of.

Buffalo, your new Main Street promises to be a sweetheart.  All you have to do is make sure your city politicals make sure you come out of it with a diverse economy, an economically diverse populace, that your new Main Street will have something for everyone and be the destination everyone wants to get to on the week-end.  

Primary Source wants to see that happen and wants to return to Buffalo for that and for that missed opportunity of the fried baloney sandwich, number 3 in the mighty Buffalo culinary trio of Buffalo wings (with suicide sauce), Beef Weck and the fried baloney wonder!

Additional Sources:  

Here’s a link to a New York State website that puts population loss in New York State cities like Buffalo into a larger context: http://www.osc.state.ny.us/localgov/pubs/research/pop_trends.pdf.

Check today’s Chicago Tribune and Ron Grossman’s piece on the Uber phenomenon and its place in labor history.

 

 

 

One Block At A Time             nan turpin photographs                       

SUMMER OF BUFFALOVE (that’s how they say it)

Home of the Bisons
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Buffalo, NY.  Here’s how to get friendly with a new town fast:  go to their Triple-A minor league baseball park the night you arrive.  The Buffalo Bisons play hard no matter what.  Lose tonight, win tomorrow.  The park holds 18,000 and even if  a few thousand don’t make it to the game, who comes is loud enough to let the team know they are loved.  

After dark, before you even start to figure the deserted downtown out, the little ball park can look like the only place to get food on dry land.  There’s a restaurant inside, Pettibones, and an outpost of Charlie the Butcher’s selling the best Beef Weck around.  Pettibones has Buffalo Wings but who can pass up a Weck?

Before the Bisons got Coca-Cola Field (1988) they had another park, Pilot Field.   You can still find pictures of it on-line.  The “new” park is just back of the bottom of Main Street and once you figure out how to get past all the chain link construction fences and deserted Main Street-induced anxiety, you see the ball field is holding the place for city life that’s still going on.  In the next 72 hours you’ll see there’s plenty of life going on in Buffalo but it’s this ball game that helps you see all that.  

The Bisons might lose one night but they win the next.  And the first night in a new town, with all the shock and questions and wrong assumptions revealed, there’s nothing quite as calming as a Triple-A game with a lot of heart.  In Buffalo, New York.

WHERE THE WATERS MEET

Let’s take a walk to Silo City
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Buffalo, NY, dusk into night.  Who was it…someone told me it’s just the last fifteen years the people of Buffalo, Buffalonians, are proud of themselves and their town.  When does not proud turn into proud?  

When does let me out of here turn into I think I like it?  People who’ve been very ill and are on the mend pay close attention to this sort of thing and some of them know the morning, the minute they start to feel better.  Places are like that too and Buffalo is one of them and a delight to discover.  Buffalonians want you to know all about everything, not just how it all began, the river, the lake, the canal, how Black Rock wanted it but Buffalo got it.  These people want you to know how it is now, Main Street’s gutted like a fish but it’s not rotting in the sun, it’s being put back a block at a time.  

Dorothy, by day a Buffalo social worker, by night a civic wonder, asked us if we needed a ride back to town.  By then it was dark and the ruins of the grain industry, the massings of grain elevators along the river were ominously beautiful silhouettes and the old silos, dark inside with rusk and vampires, had become things we didn’t want to disturb.  Yes, take us home, Dorothy, and this good lady of Buffalo drove us around and around, and showed us the butterfly’s view of Buffalo:  the old Amtrak station, the lot where a Frank Lloyd Wright used to be, the stubbed ends of silos they’d managed to rub out before the people realized they had beautiful ruins here.  

Buffalo the 19th century, the city of industry, the city of movement of shipping, where all the good soft processed loaves of American began, Buffalo was building a new city on top of itself but it’s smart and tender enough to know they have to leave the rust and husks of what made them. On a clear day they can see Niagara Falls.  The information lady in City Hall said that.  You don’t believe?  “Go up to the top of the tower and see for yourself.  Take that elevator.”  We don’t see it but she’s right.  Niagara Falls, all that electricity, Maid of the Mist, Made in America, tell Buffalo something they don’t already know.  

And now they remember they know it again and they like where they live.  If you go and if Dorothy Mehnert asks you if you need a lift, just say yes and see what you see next.

BACK HOME BLUES

Finding our sweet spot, Chicago Blues Festival just now
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Last week-end half-million people banged up enough to look past each other met at the old festival grounds in Grant Park, Chicago.  They were, we were, all things from all times, the rockers still rocking the bluesmen still wailing the young ones having a hunch they’d already got it.  (A young man with a tribute to his dear dead brother tattooed on his arm.  He carried a baby.  It was Fathers’ Day and a strange gravity clung to the city all day.)

Primary Source was glad to be back home and shares these glimpses of the blues at dusk.

All blues, all blue, altogether in Chicago.  Aaron Neville and Dr. John up there and we don’t forget New Orleans.  And we don’t forget the cities coming back to life.  

Tomorrow we’ll have a look at Buffalo, New York, a city that’s healing itself.