PLACE SAVING & SLOW CHANGE

We’ve been walking and looking and thinking about the idea of “place making” that seems to arise when someone wants to un-make a place.  Wabash Avenue in Chicago has lately caught the eye of the improvers.  

Wabash Avenue has, like so much of any city, changed gradually over the years.  It’s the pace of change that’s really in question here.  Gradual change is more complicated than change that’s planned and executed in a timely manner, on time and on budget.  Gradual change means more people, more other changes going on behind each small change.  

What we get from the slowness is place- a street, a neighborhood- that’s…use your favorite adjective here (dense, “thick”, “chewy”, etc. your turn).  Slower change can make the place more interesting and, if the change sticks, what changed is probably engaging more people and more different kinds of people.   That means real “diversity” and probably means economic diversity.  

So fine,  prove it, right?  Where’s your “metrics.”  Primary Source is using this methodogy:  strolling and clicking the camera.  Click: good eats in here.  Click:  diamonds and hummous in here.  Click:  landmark hotel over here.  Click:  upstairs for good smokes.  Click:  hot dogs and fried chicken together again.  Click:  “give the lady what she wants,” under new ownership.  Buy some cloth, need a button?  Click.  Cupcakes only, no cookies need apply.  Click.  Wabash Avenue, all place all day all night.  It’s always changing, that’s what a city does, too many people not to.   

Take the Time
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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.

WABASH AVENUE SWEET (cont.)

Wabash Ave. #2, Up Through El
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Wabash Avenue is the best place in the world to walk under trains.

If you’re the one who orders “with everything,” walk down Wabash Avenue with the falafel you just bought in the back of a jewelry store, look at heavy duty w0rkman togs for a smooth-handed generation, dodge hotel doormen, luggage carts, stevedores, office workers on the sidewalks and look up whenever an elevated train clatters over head – Brown, Green, Orange Lines.  

Choose Wabash and you choose flickering sunlight, centuries of architecture all around you and an occasional airplane in the holes where the sky is.  See something on the other side of the street that looks good and it’s usually not that hard to cross, traffic seems lighter and drivers attentive and thoughtful.  Back here on Wabash it’s human.  Wabash Avenue is a real place.

This is another installment in the Primary Source series on real places vs. “place making,” a question revived lately by a downtown initiative to beautify and sanitize Wabash Avenue.  Drop in tomorrow for more on what makes a city real.  All on Wabash Avenue, downtown, Chicago.

Wabash Avenue, #3 

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
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CURATION NATION; Curating a Chicago Alley

“Activated” Alley After
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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.

UNSEASONABLY CHILL

Dayhawk
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That’s all, nothing much.  The town’s not deserted but some skies on some days it feels like it.

This morning’s paper has front page fireworks about “place making” and alley parties and how it’s “so much cooler” to have a coffee in an alley than in a regular coffee shop.  It’s all the thing’s Primary Source has curmudgeoned about since she blew into town such a long eon ago and now, there’s a not for profit that will do it with some corporate sponsorship in a way to, in the hopes of, attracting young money in young pockets into the Chicago Loop at night, keep them from hopping trains to northern nethers of clubby Chicago.  Long-range plan. Find the funky, hose it down, package it and celebrate FunkyTown.com.  Will they name a drink after it?

Downtown Chicago’s already the biggest college town in the country, right?  Second biggest?  I forget.  That’s just downtown.  It was a Daley plan that’s working out well, attracting college branches and dorms downtown. It’s filled the streets with students and attracted more businesses that like them around twenty years old.

We got good pizzas downtown for a change and art supply stores and clothing stores with dresses like belts and shoes like small furniture, clomp clomp clomp.  We got a tattoo parlor too and we got that it’s fun to be downtown again, something to dilute the shopping families.  This alley project seems aimed at a slightly older crowd, the ones with jobs, on their way up or thinking they are and so willing to spend some of that new job money.

This is fine.  Can we come?  Or will the alleys soon be private property?  Is that the way of our world?  In our cities a spot’s either funky and forgotten or it’s turned into private property, so keep out.

Primary Source will nose around later today when they start festivitizing in that alley behind Sullivan Center (behind the State Street Target store if you missed the Trib story).  The light’s not so great today but maybe a picture for tomorrow, no promises.  That’s the thing, when something’s changing, no promises.  Can we live with that?  Yeah, probably.  No promises.