ALREADY A PLACE

“Place making” can threaten actual places and Wabash Avenue is one of those.  

This week (eek!) the term place making was all over a program Loop Alliance had in the old Louis Sullivan alley between Monroe and Madison in the Chicago Loop.  The latest place making announcement, yesterday, is cause for alarm.  

Loop Alliance wants to extend their special taxing district to grow a pot of money for additional downtown beautification.   If the city accepts the plan the Alliance of downtown cultural, political and business interests (go to their website) would have more streets to “improve.”  Improvement, Alliance spokesman has suggested, would include herding panhandlers off the streets and power hosing whatever is deemed soiled. 

Should the city agree, the anti-urban “place making” campaign could afford to sanitize and standardize what is currently a good stretch of quirky city street, the shadiest place in town on a scorching summer’s day, thanks to the elevated trains that run overhead.  The Loop Alliance has said that a Wabash Avenue cleansing would be a priority.   Wabash Avenue, with all its lovely and ’til now spiciness, could look like ye olde Galena.

There’s still time to make it sparkle with banality before the super-mortgaged move into their $7-digit condos going up along the elevated tracks.  These poor people are paying top-notch prices to live over the El.  The least we can do is make their front doors a place not that different from the suburbs many are moving in from.  It’s called “place making.”

Today Primary Source begins a short run of Wabash Avenue photos, snapshots of a lively street that really doesn’t need any more of the kind of help Loop Alliance wants to be paid to give.  Wabash Avenue is fine.  

Let a new class of residents move in overhead, let them bring their pets with.  Welcome to them. We’ll graciously step around the mess their dogs start leaving on formerly pristine downtown sidewalks and in exchange, they will love Wabash Avenue, a street they chose to live on, for all that it is.  

Wabash Avenue Suite, #1
nan turpin photograph 

TEAM SPORT: CHICAGO SPIDERS

Spiders in Springtime / nan turpin photograph

 

This week the “Spiderman” movie after the last one came out.  How can we resist?  Tuesday afternoon Primary Source saw the velvet ropes going up in one theatre for a sneak preview of Spidey.  Soon it will be summer with the corn popping at movies in the neighborhood parks and we will know if all the little boys still dress like the Spiderman when the sun goes down.  We like our Spiderguy here.

Spring is advanced enough that high rise condo spiders have moved in for the season and we are never sure if we are seeing the old friend from last year or if this one’s new in the neighborhood.  Welcome in either case.

And, not that this is in any way related, but the Loop Alliance, after its Alley party of a couple of nights ago that this column finally succumbed to, that Loop Alliance made its move in this morning’s Chicago Tribune.   The Alliance wants its empire expanded to include Wabash Avenue and Michigan Avenue (from Wacker Drive to Congress Parkway) plus some buildings that seep over to Dearborn, just west of State Street.

This substantial territorial expansion is projected to create an extra $6.3million in taxes tossed into the Loop Alliance toy box of downtown “improvements.”  According to the Chicago Tribune story this morning, the tax expansion would give Loop Alliance the money to “transform  Wabash into a more inviting corridor.”

Wabash has already been subjected to a beautification program that included hanging pots of flowers from the lamp posts.  That last round of primping turned the bustling commercial street that runs along the “El” tracks into something like a 6 year old in mommy’s high heels and false eyelashes.

But fine.  If that makes some people feel “safe,” ok.  What the Alliance proposes now is spending part of a territorial expansion profit on more of the Alliance’s black-jacketed agents who “police” the street rousting panhandlers.  Better they should take a tax expansion and set up pop-up soup kitchens at lunch time.  Dear Loop Alliance, there’s an effective depression going on out there.  

A couple of weeks ago Primary Source observed two  black jacket “agents” on State Street showing “concern” for a gentleman who was seated on the sidewalk against the wall of a building.  He was available for accepting small donations of cash, should the occasion arise.  He was well dressed in what looked like some recent season high end outdoor fashions.  To be clear, he looked like a man who might have, say six months earlier, have lived in one of those luxury condo towers they’re screwing into historically preserved facades along the Wabash elevated train.

This latest project by the Loop Alliance bruises one’s civic sensibility.

In response, let’s all be strolling the downtown blocks of Wabash Avenue, take our pictures of what makes it specifically splendid.  Primary Source will document some of her favorite little pockets of Wabash.  You do the same.  Awareness is our favorite hobby.

CURATION NATION; Curating a Chicago Alley

“Activated” Alley After
nan turpin photographs

Primary Source decided to cover the May Day/Haymarket/Immigration rally that closed the block of Clark Street in front of the U.S. Immigration center.  It was a chilly late afternoon with a spitty kind of rain and she decided to call it a day and so missed the Loop Alliance downtown “activation” event, part of their “place-making” caravan around Chicago.

Loop Alliance announced a preliminary set of activations paced at one a month and last night was downtown. Here’s a link to get you into their world.  There’s a good picture from the party last night but this link really stars those who heard the call through increasingly smaller carriers of technology and responded and emoted through the favored event automatic responder of the day.  Press 2 for extra exclamation points.  Teasing aside, however, their reach outs and shout outs and tweets and re-tweets are the confetti left after what sounds like quite a load of fun in the confines of a place where people not at the party will be loading and unloading and checking clipboards and adjusting the elastic wraps that keep their spine together.  Ships that pass.

http://do312.com/events/2014/5/1/chicago-loop-alliance

We did take an early morning look at the Sullivan Center Alley between State Street and Wabash, the morning after.  This morning the only signs of a party were the blue plastic toilet chateaux (2) and a hand sanitizing station.  And also the mural by what yesterday’s Chicago Tribune called “Street Artist Don’t Fret” (see artist’s signature in lower left corner of mural).

Yesterday Primary Source was churlish about the formal civic-non-profit-corporate complex organizing spontaneity and funk.  This morning, walking through alley in question, P.S. was charmed by the project.  The organizers could not have chosen a better alley in this city of alleys.  It runs a block between what used to be the two sides of Carson, Pirie, Scott Department Store, the prized Louis Sullivan building.  Raised loading docks punctuate the length of it and the place vibrates with the hustle and shouts of labor past and hard work to come.

The last two pictures in this photo essay are from this morning’s prowl, the look of just another day in a Chicago Loop Alley, nothing to see, just the usual dumpsters, the warning signs, the massive hanging fire escapes, an occasional short-cutter, a worker or just some guy who wants out of the fray for a while, have a sit, have a think and then get back out there.

The usual alleys tend to be pot-holed, puddled, and oil and grease-slicked.  They are a terrain to be danced around, leaped over or walked through.  You choose the alleys you embrace them.  Last night’s activated alley was power-washed before the party (Chicago Tribune, May 1) to make sure the party was not uncool in any way.  The rats had to watch it all from their holes.