ANACHRONISM, WAITING, ROOMS

This reporter has had the happy use of the refreshed Damen Brown Line station on the west side of Chicago this summer.  The environs thereabout have been, still are gentrifying, fast, like a rapid heartbeat.  Just north Lawrence Avenue is getting a new surface and median planters down the street.  The “ask” for condos and homes rises with sellers wondering if they’re asking “enough.”  We are in the days of Never Enough.

The couple of blocks around this elevated train station are small, local, neighborhood businesses, eating spots that don’t rely on the week-end aggression of high-end brunching, places where you can slide in and still get a malted milk…unless the chocolate malt you’re trying to pull through the straw is actually a retro-malted “like in the day.”  Hard to tell what’s real these days when nostalgia stands for history and a higher “ask.”

But this little dot of a neighborhood has the real feel of the real deal in large part because of the way you get in and out of it:  by the Brown Line, Damen Station.  This 1907 station was the design work of CTA engineers.  No frills, a compact, functional station part of moving people through a changing city.

Today we can look on-line at Yelp comments presumably posted by the “users” of this station.  They are mixed, from completely alienated (homesick?) to delighted tourist, to wanting more attention to where Chicagoans meet Chicago, on an unsheltered el platform in any kind of weather.  And there are the posts by people who simply love the waiting room.

They and we dwell on the finishings, the glazed brick, the wood paneling and the waiting room furnishings made of suitcases.  We love to be in this waiting room because it is artful anachronism.  The old leather luggage with its brass fittings remind us of the fortitude of travelers whose empty luggage was heavier than anything they could put in it.

We recall a time when a subway station was treated like a train station, with people sitting inside, waiting for their train to pull into the station.  Even if the 1907 station was a crowded panicky place with passengers rushing to their trains, this waiting room suggested something more genteel, like a miniature Union Station, the gateway to America.

The most annoyed Yelp commenters are fixed in their own, current time.  They know they have no time to “wait” in a sheltered waiting room or sit on an artful bench.  They will never use time that way.  They “have places to go” in the words of one.  They have a device to consult that waits for nothing, even as they bound up the stairs up to the platform and closing doors of the train they are missing because someone back there on the stairs wouldn’t get out of the way.  Places to be, places to go, no time, time is money, out of time.  Damen Brown Line Station.

DAMEN BROWN LINE EL STATION
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Additional Sources:

http://www.chicago-l.org/stations/damen-ravens.html

HOT DAY – STORM LATER

Waiting for the #18
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This is the summer of not caring.  

It’s hot ’til it hails.  We dress for comfort; no what ifs; no just in case.  And if we get caught, the #18 comes, we all stuff into it, sun’s hot, air’s steam and if by 18th Street it’s dark, it’s pounding hail out there, if and when, we’ll all just stay in here, inside the 18.  No one gets off.  Now we live here.  We are neighbors now.

FRIDAY AFTERNOONS!

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!

THE SECOND CITY (BENEATH THE TRACKS), Part 2. photo essay

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.

WORLD BENEATH THE TRACKS, 2-part week-end photo essay

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 IN THE COP HOUSE

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.

BLUES LINE CHICAGO

Blue Line Chicago
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Like they say here it’s all good it’s alright it’s all blue it’s all blues.

On this Blue Line train platform so glad it’s not the Prairie any more and if on the hottest day of the year so far a girl wants to go west she just stands here and waits with the rest of us.  Something’s bound to happen bound west.  Waiting is when the most stuff goes on, dreams of homework done daydreams of more to come.  Message arriving read this before you do anything else.  Music,  jazz really but on this Blue Line platform more like blues.  He’s playing it slow so the notes just hang there in this always slightly damp air of the underground train to take us west.

 What we do when we get there is up to us.

PLENTY OF PLACE ON WABASH

Wabash at the River
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Today we’re running a few more random snaps of Chicago’s Wabash Avenue, a place that has recently caught the eye again of groups bent on downtown improvement through something they’re calling “place making.”  Our pictures suggest all along the Loop blocks of Wabash the places are already made.  

One is reminded of Eric Wolf’s seminal anthropology text Europe and the People Without History.  His approach to colonialism helped a new generation of scholars get interested in one of colonialism’s strongest rationales:  territories and the people to be taken had no history; had not taken optimum, modern advantage of what they had and therefore, could have it taken from them by those more worthy of the task.  Wolf shined his light on the conquerors claim, “There’s nothing there.  We can take it.”

Primary Source sometimes wonders if applying the place making concept to parts of the city that are already full of vitality is not a kissing cousin to the “people without history” argument.  Just wondering.  

Meanwhile, enjoy your own promenade under the “El” and see yourself some sights.  Thanks for the visit, it’s always good to see you.  We’ll have a few more of the sights along Wabash tomorrow.

LOOK UP, SPIN AROUND, ARCHI-CRUSH CHICAGO

TOP TO BOTTOM,
3 LAYERS
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HAROLD WASHINGTON LIBRARY ELEVATED STOP, CHICAGO

Foreign visitors to Chicago sometimes say they come for the architecture and that’s to be expected in this town probably.  But if we press them for more explanation many will say they come for the varieties of architecture, for the stunning, surprising combinations of architectural styles, for the extant, visible record of technology – masonry to steel frame, stair to elevator buildings, small windows with ornamental framing to glass curtain walls, all of it there all around us if we look up.

Chicago bard and historian Greg Borzo, who literally wrote the book on the “El” argues the Chicago Elevated has contributed importantly to saving some of the old building stock around it.  The more expensive per square foot more modern towers built blocks away from the Loop El because who would pay top dollar to look at and listen to a train.  Primary Source is charmed by Greg’s argument.  

Primary Source likes to walk with head in the clouds, panning across all the buildings that crush together in our very own and local tapestry of how it all came to be.  (But also to keep a keen eye on Chicago’s other trademark, cracked and irregular pavement.)

Additional Source: Greg Borzo, The Chicago El, for full reference, see Greg’s website http://www.gregborzo.com/.  He presented his Chicago El study last night at Hafele, an architectural hardware firm.

ANXIOUSLY URBAN

Taking apart, putting together nan turpin photograph

 

Future historians might well wonder how our culture survived at all by starting its day with the daily newspaper exacerbated by cups and cups of coffee.  If, at least, we took our news with a sleeping pill or… our caffeine with bird calls and a breath of daffodil musk…but coffee and the news in prickly combination!

 

In Chicago we have daily installments of large-scale, highly technical urban crises:  from public school closings that parents and others say will put children and teenagers into physical danger.  Even significant numbers of Chicago aldermen agreed lately the school closings are a public menace.

 

In Chicago we are watching the slow motion collision of what seems to be public interest and a contract deal that many CTA riders feel will confine them to quarters.  We see the charts of murder statistics that like certain corporate earnings rise steadily.

 

Days and weeks go by at a time when the urban citizen wonders if it’s just time to stop knowing.  But then here’s what can happen.  Primary Source has been riding the Brown Line elevated train more than usual lately.  For one it’s the best ride in town, all outside with unbeatable City views, South to North and back again.  There’s another satisfaction that was keen in March.  The first nearly half of the month, the Wells St. Bridge was closed for renovation.  This is a town that is justifiably proud of the brute industrial style of its Chicago River bridges, as well as the downtown quantity.  When the Wells Street Bridge closed-and the CTA did organize that closing efficiently and effectively- the lives of great numbers of us changed.  We became aware of how precious bridges were.  We re-organized our days, work and play, and our nights around this convenience of yet another bridge that many cities have in short supply in their best times.

 

As well, we were drawn more intimately into how an old city and a big city works, we saw the bridge taken apart, we saw about ten days of barges and cranes and equipment just invented for the Wells Street Bridge it seemed moved into place, with workmen who worked through the biting cold of the end of winter in sprays of sparks that could not warm them.  We all milled above the snarl of old and new engineering and snapped pictures as long as we could until our fingers were stiff from the cold and needed to wrap around a cup of hot coffee somewhere nearby.

 

And then it was done, the Wells Street Bridge back in business as predicted and the Brown Line elevated train crossing the Chicago River to and fro’ so smoothly you only remembered you were gliding over water because the view out the window became that beautiful perspective of architecture along a river.

 

When I read the paper some days now and can’t figure a way out of some of the local stories I think about the confusion of that broken up bridge in winter and how it was put back.  And then, we denizens and citizens of our cities regain our composure and get back to trying to figure out what can be done.  And we talk to each other.

…next episode, a little bit on the bridges