Thousand-year old Paris applies glass to the past; transparency to its medieval functions; new money to old power. Can they accustom us to their program? Are old certainties – good and evil – goners? Who’s louder us or money? How will we know? Are slick expos the answer?
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:
The Colored Musicians Club, Buffalo
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This otherwise unremarkable two-story brick storefront, with its neighboring couple of buildings and businesses, is what’s left on a Buffalo block that was pretty near urban renewed out of existence, like a lot of neighborhoods across the country. Chicago lost some of the best parts of what it was by civic “improvement” in the 1960s and ’70s and proved it didn’t need a Robert Moses to do it.
Today in Chicago we’re seeing a new style of fragmented urban renewal roll through the city. One of the new-style urban renewal tools is re-designating entire neighborhoods or individual blocks and buildings “tear downs.”
Even in the essays of Chicago’s main architecture critic we see a casual way of assuming the current real estate speculation is beneficial to the city. Startlingly inflated property values are commonly referred to as a good way to improve the city’s revenue stream and take pressure off under-funded public pension plans.
One way or another real estate speculation right now is forcing people to leave their neighborhoods and forcing them to the edges of the city and then out. Real estate speculation is not adding value to the city and relieving the burden of the tax rolls. At least we can consider it is part of a new rhetoric in the service of the new-style urban renewal.
Primary Source recently looked into what Buffalonians are trying to do to revive their town. The Queen City has a lot of problems, just one being the loss of nearly half its population in recent decades. One of the things the civic core seem to agree on right now is reviving their historical sites, including recent 20th century history places, helps natives and newcomers alike give deeper meaning to the city they are choosing to stay in.
The Colored Musicians Club is just one historical monument that might, in another city, like Chicago, say, be just a two-story brick storefront, architecturally unremarkable, one of the last buildings standing on a block that wants something “else” to be there. Read the Club’s historical plaque (photo below) and continue their history on the Club’s website.
What saved this building and institution is continuity of ownership and oversight by a group, the Club, that kept what they had a live part of Buffalo. They rented the ground floor to the African American Musicians Union for a while. During segregation the building, the Club and union hall downstairs, were a place for black jazz musicians to play and meet.
After the Civil Rights Law was applied in 1969 and segregated unions were required to integrate, black musicians found themselves in minority voting positions. That’s when control of real estate, like the Buffalo club became even more important to black musicians. Read that post-integration section of their website’s history link for an excellent summary of what black musicians were up against once “things got better.”
The Club continued to run the top floor as a music club and after hours joint where jazz talent, the famous and local players, could mix and jam. Music was music, all were welcome and this modest two-story brick was a place where culture changed and bright ideas made it into horn and keyboard while Buffalo slept.
During our recent Buffalo discovery trip, Primary Source was pleased to have a private tour of the Club by its 15-year president, George Scott. He’s the man behind the bar in the picture below. Mr. Scott gave us further detail of how the Club made it into the 21st century to be acknowledged in Buffalo as a destination for locals and international visitors alike.
In recent years the Club re-structured itself into a not-for-profit, that gatekeeper structure for institutional survival in the United States. They tended to their physical plant with method and fund-raising campaigns and made the building whole. And they run a full weekly program of shows, of music classes for kids.
The Museum downstairs is very recent, designed by the firm that did the 9/11 museum in New York. Mr. Scott says they are proud of the museum and especially proud that its numerous listening posts give visitors complete jazz compositions, not just a 15-second teaser. Their series of headphones are a place in Buffalo to get lost in the work of your favorite artists or to be knocked off your feet by something new to you. They back the music up with interviews and photographs of the artists when they can. It’s a wonderful strange kind of museum that makes you feel like you’re in a nightclub and it’s 1946 or 1935 while you never forget it’s 2014 outside.
George Scott always puts the Club in its neighborhood context. The Michigan Street Baptist Church and Nash House behind it, just around the corner from the Club, were the very last stop in the Underground Railway that hid fugitive slaves and got many across the water to Canada. And down the street there’s another old building with the African-American Cultural Center, dance, theatre, people. Buffalo was a major center for black intellectuals and political strategists throughout the 19th century. The Niagara Movement had its first meeting in Buffalo in 1905, just one example. The Colored Musicians Club and some of its brother and sister institutions in town are part of what keeps a distinguished intellectual and political and artistic production of people in a place vital today. That two-story brick on Broadway.
There are big gaps on these blocks where the life was torn out for a progress that still hasn’t come. But they’ll be rebuilt and these few vigorous historical and cultural outfits are there, in Buffalo, to make sure that the neighborhood comes back for the people who made it to begin with.
This history has nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with keeping palpable a dynamic past in the dynamic present. This is is a complex, delicate work to be doing. These aren’t historic “trappings;” they are the inescapable prelude to the present.
Consider our cities haunted in ways we can use.
Now back to Chicago. It has a Historic Landmarks Commission, as we know. That body was formed in 1957 and about a decade later the landmarking Ordinance was drafted (link below). There were revisions in 1987, 1997, 1999 as is the nature of that kind of document.
Click to the Ordinance link and see for yourself, roughly pages 1 and 2, the criteria for landmarking. Architectural significance is far from the only criterion. A building like Vee Jay Records might make a case for landmarking, it seems.
The problem is who would want to do it? Probably not the owner. Certainly not an owner that currently thinks they can get $1.2million. Nobody would pay that much for history.
There’s a west Loop neighborhood right now, the Randolph-Fulton Market District, that’s in the midst of a slow-motion slug-fest over historic landmarking for their entire district. Property owners fear it, arguing it would snatch potentially high sales prices they think they could get from the google-spawn tech companies nibbling at those blocks and warehouses. Historic landmarking, they fear, means layers of regulation preventing owners from making the best dollar decisions they can for adding value.
Those who want to protect their neighborhood’s past and identity a little with historic district landmarking say not so. They argue owners can still make profitable changes to landmarked buildings and get incentives for restoration and, if they want to sell, still make a very attractive profit. No one believes the other guy. A few blocks east, from over here in the Loop, it looks like they’re at a stand-off.
Vee Jay Records needs help. That’s one thing that’s clear. What’s going to happen to it? If it sells (probably way below $1.2million) in the current feeding frenzy in that part of the South Loop, it might be knocked down and fast. Then there would only be the option of a historical tombstone, “This was a very important place in Chicago. We knocked it down and buried it here, in front of this 4-star barbecue and martini club.”
Additional Sources:
+The Colored Musicians’ Club website is a model for websites, with video and photo archives as well as the usual kinds of website information:
http://www.coloredmusiciansclub.org/history.html
+City of Chicago Historic Landmarks Ordinance text: http://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/zlup/Historic_Preservation/Publications/Chicago_Landmarks_Ordinance_2014.pdf
July 4 at the Chicago History Museum
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Fourth of July Chicago, by day we’re in the old times, Sauganash Inn, dancing, fiddling, drinking, trading, gambling all together, all mixing, different tribes, French, metis and music on that swampy prairie by the lake, under a winter moon.
Music from that old time in our heads and tonight, the Fourth, all around Chicago the townships and backyards are setting off fireworks, rockets, fire crackers, the city is surrounded by explosions. It didn’t stop all night like, like the Sauganash Inn.
And we slept sweet and deep with that Fourth of July lullaby- pops and whistles, great geysers of sparks burning through the sky, in our dreams of Sauganash, another rowdy night in there, that fiddler’s never tired.
Some nights a lonely night shift jackhammer on the prairie will keep you up and grumbling but tonight, the Fourth, dreams are so heavy and noisy you can’t wake up; you need to see how they turn out.
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.
Looking for Light
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Spring is the actual true season for beginnings, not our unconvincing New Years of contrived resolutions. In this season we have momentary clairvoyant vision of a different future produced by impending change, etc. etc. Looking for the light and all that. Agreed.
Primary Source will argue this morning that Springtime is the Historical season because it is the time we anticipate change, the future, with optimism and not dread. Right now we are all saying “But I love the Fall or Winter’s my favorite season” but you take my point: which is that in those precious times when change promises good things, we can admit the transitory nature of all and sundry and “historicize” the whole shebang.
Primary Source is just going to go ahead and say that while that’s not always a comfortable way to proceed, it’s probably useful.
And this brings us to this morning’s newspaper and the Chicago Tribune story on Nordstrom’s department store’s big freshening project. This Nordstrom’s is inside a shopping mall on North Michigan Avenue and, mall-style, is sealed off from daylight. That will change now and the day as well as the outside world will become part of the shopping experience. Store spokespeople call it an effort to remain “relevant” to what shoppers want. This is something that retail likes to do periodically.
Primary Source loves these relevance-adjustment moments, especially when they are made tangible like this one, part of daily life, part of shopping. This morning’s story talks about different departments in the store that will be re-designed, rebuilt for different, changing shopping practices. The customers are changing the way they do things because their world is changing, what they expect is changing.
Part of it is that the way they are stimulated, or as we used to say the way they get information, is changing, the way people perceive each other, interact with each other or don’t is changing, all of that. And all of that affects the way they spend their money or don’t. A tangible store, one that isn’t a hologram, like a store in a real shopping center, has to compete with on-line effervescence and that’s just one thing. So Nordstrom’s is making a really big window to the world (see 17th century).
That’s a very big change. It’s a “makeover” among all the many makeovers that we love to watch. It’s another before and after moment in our daily life, even if we don’t really shop, it is happening out there. And that’s a little bit what history is. Looking for lipstick a whole new way. Seriously.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Bobby G. for the Business pages
Thanks to Joan and Brian for great big daffodils from Michigan
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The Midnight Effect
Can’t miss it, Paris has a magic night sky that simply illuminates its past. Stated more precisely and scientifically, Parisian night darkens what’s new and leaves only the historical radiance, the peculiar light emitted by time passed. This is the City of Light. If by day you forget what has happened, go to a cafe, order a beer at the bar, wait for dusk, wait for dark, go forth into the city, go back and forth across the city, and all that is past is revealed. If illumination is insufficient, GPS and a friend who drives will take you back into history. Happy New Year, today is the day. In a place like Paris every day is New Year, every day searches out new and re-discovers old, celebrates both. Happy New Day every day. Thanks for joining us to give homage to the old and new. Come again tomorrow, we’re not done with Paris. How could we be?
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Medieval Moderne, Paris
Bonjour. Glad you could make it. In these last days of one calendar and first days of the next, we’re considering the ways old and new might co-exist. We are looking for an image of peaceful coexistence with our own histories. Here’s a well-loved famous entry into the old medieval student quarter of Paris, sacred ground of sacred drunkenness and public bonfires of those who spoke too freely when they were sober. Noisy, itinerant, self-confessed lovers of life, unashamed, unabashed quaffers of all they could get, the Latin Quarter, its medieval building stock preserved, old stone, old timbers, fragrant coils of staircase, sans concierges, ground floor commerce, meat grilling, rats, key words of anachronism, beloved because bygone, world class zoo of things discarded, if you have to ask you can’t afford it upstairs, buy a slice of 6th floor walk-up here or buy a small country elsewhere. Zinc roofs, maids rooms, laundry strung across the smallest windows flapping in a good breeze so as to dry and keep the pigeons out all at the same time. This we teem in, flock to, cling to, this we love and this we hate, cobbles hurt our feet, slick with trash in a dousing rain, this we love and this we hate, past and present, it sells good, it smells like a raft of lamb grilling among the postcards and keychains. It’s a zoo. We can leave the gates unlocked and let our history live all around the town. Come back tomorrow. New Year’s Eve. We’ve got a party picture for your New Year’s Eve. It’s in another part of Paris.
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Six hundred years ago Orange Pants has his 2-Chevaux break down, he just crosses that little bit of Seine over to the Cour des Miracles, the front porch of Notre Dame Cathedral, and, on a good day, he comes back and Voila! It’s a miracle! The car is running fine. Not so strong on the miracles are we. We chose the car, we took the modern and it’s broken down. Therefore, today he stays on this side of the river. Guy walks into a cafe, orders a beer, drinks his beer, looks out at his broken car looks across the river beyond it and wonders if he’s ahead of history or not. That’s all we’re saying. Give perspective a chance. All we are saying, is give history a chance, in the tune of the old song. Get some new, keep some old. Funny thing is, 600 years ago, this guy’s pants: still orange.
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