While I Slept

 Many people have noticed that the Rogers Park blogging scene has grown strangely quiescent lately. This is the first time I've written a post of any length since January, and a couple of other Rogers Park bloggers seemed to have fled the scene completely, notably Craig Gernhart, who has taken his blog private. Others are posting far less often, and most strangely of all, none of us wrote much about the municipal election this February, even though this election was the most noteworthy in twenty years, giving us a new mayor and many new council members. I can't help but sense fatigue and disappointment in our local bloggers, but a few of them remain extremely involved in the community and are fully occupied with projects that will contribute greatly to the betterment of Rogers Park. At some point, people want to do more than just discuss an issue, and get their hands and hearts into actually making a difference, and that is exactly what a few prominent Rogers Park bloggers are doing.

So a number of momentous events went unremarked on by the local punditocracy, but that doesn't mean they weren't noticing, or doing anything.

For some reason, the whole issue filled me with distaste, suddenly, as my favorite candidate for Edgewater's 48th Ward, the talented, outspoken Phil Bernstein, looked to be headed to overwhelming defeat by legacy pol Harry Osterman, and most of all as my own ward, the 49th here in Rogers Park, had to choose between bad and worse. It was really all I could do to motivate myself to even vote, and had there not been a Mayor to select, I might not have. Well, and the 50th elected a promising new alderman, Debra Silverstein, and Rahm Emanuel looks more promising every day, surprising me vastly. Emanuel appears to be very focused on cutting unnecessary expenditures and restoring the city to financial viability, and is intolerant of nonsense, unlike his predecessor.

Meanwhile, life has been happening and not exactly the way I need it to, and many other interests and urgent personal matters came between me and this blog. Getting re-employed at a better job and scaring up more money have become extremely urgent matters, and a personal project, the commercial website I've been putting together, have both been claiming a large part of my time and energy. Focus and energy, or lack thereof, have been problems, but most of all, there has simply been so much to discuss, that I hardly know where to start, really.

Now that I've recovered from my disappointment over the outcome of a couple of aldermanic races, and celebrated a couple of others, such as James Cappleman's well-deserved victory in the 46th and Silverstein's in the 50th, and the election of a mayor who displays real intelligence, I can focus on my usual areas of interest, like the urgent need for preparing Chicago for a different energy regime, developing new sources of energy, and improving the quality of life in our North Coast neighborhoods and making them as attractive and comfortable as possible.

Loyola-Morgan Retail District: Gains and Losses

We can't fail to be impressed by the recent transformation of the formerly forlorn stretch of Sheridan between Devon and Albion. The strip of disused buildings and vacant lots has blossomed  into a lively and attractive retail district with the addition of the Morgan at Loyola Station rental apartment building, a good-looking and appropriately scaled mid-rise building with small ground-floor retail shops; and a pocket that used to be ugly and a little forbidding is now cozy and inviting. This pocket of Rogers Park is now the most successful and attractive retail district in the neighborhood, and it is helped a lot by the proximity of two major grocery stores and other retail in Edgewater a few blocks south.

Yet, as you travel south on Sheridan into Broadway and consider the moribund two-block stretch of Broadway just south of Sheridan, and spotty Devon Ave, you're reminded of how much easier it is to destroy a neighborhood than it is to build it, and how important is appropriate development, for Broadway Blvd is an essay in the destruction wrought by ugly, auto-oriented, anti-urban development; a wilderness of strip mall slums and drive-through food outlets and self-storage facilities. Actually, the street contains a number of interesting small businesses, including a couple of antique stores and a wonderful day spa as well as several interesting small restaurants, but they're a little lost among the seas of parking, fast food outlets and other auto-oriented garbage. Just a couple of blocks south, Broadway between Granville and Sheridan is still a cold, lackluster corridor of drive-through food outlets and parking lots, and Devon is pocked with disused parking lots fronting the street and vacant storefronts. But attractive, interesting, lively urban neighborhoods don't develop in a day, and it will take quite a few more years and an improved economic climate for this area to develop fully, and to reverse 75 years of  atrocious urban planning and deterioration.

And that's just as well. Maybe we need to move a little more slowly, and build more carefully, with every building built with care and love. We Americans tend to go way too fast at way too big a scale, with no consideration for unintended consequences and no regard for feedback along the way that is signaling that things aren't working out according to plan. And now that nobody has the money to go forward with big plans except for Loyola University, the people involved in developing this area need to take a breather and consider the progress made so far.

Some of things we hope they think about before they do too much more demolition include the block of Sheridan just north of the Loyola el station. This block still contains a couple of really interesting buildings and a number of businesses that have been in the neighborhood for many decades, like Carmen's Restaurant and Affordable Optical. However, in the past fifteen years, this block has lost a lot of its charm and cohesion, having been decimated by fires that destroyed a couple of charming old buildings, and Loyola University's demolition of a decrepit but lovely two story building and corner building. The University has rights of eminent domain in this area, which is part of the Sheridan/Devon TIF district, and the buildings that remain are in increasingly decrepit conditions, and according to one commercial tenant, are renting their commercial spaces out on a month-to-month basis, while Beck's Bookstore vacated its old building and moved to a space in the Morgan apartment building.

This would all seem to indicate that the university has plans for this block that very likely don't include the restoration of the remaining buildings on this block, including the incredible little beauty pictured below, which contains Affordable Optical and Carmen's. Chicago is fairly stuffed with buildings covered with wonderful embellishment, but I've never seen anything quite like the decorative terracotta ornamentation on this quirky little charmer, and the destruction of this building would be a tragic loss to the neighborhood. Buildings like this are what lend a neighborhood charm and character, and another bland new building, no matter how luxurious and loaded with amenities, would not replace a structure like this.

             
From here forward, the developers here need to take small, careful steps. There's no crying need for more retail space at just this point in time, given the number of empty spaces available in the area already and the extremely unfavorable business climate. Therefore, the developers might want to consider "infill" buildings for this block, small one-to-three story buildings with commercial space on the ground and perhaps second floor, and apartments above, and more important, some attention to architecture and decorative detail. The recent renovation of a row of one-story storefronts in the 1100 block of Granville in Edgewater is encouraging. These ugly, run-down spaces were recently re-fronted with attractively styled facades capped off by the attractive deco corner store, shown below.
     

   

These stylish renovations, and recently constructed mixed-use buildings allover town, while not architectural masterpieces, are major improvements on the hideous, utilitarian,suburban-style commercial development that blighted so much of the city during the 30-year period of urban destruction following WW2. Let's hope we can do even better with whatever gets built in the 6500 block of Sheridan, where the builders will be starting from scratch. Not every building, or even most buildings, has to be a  masterpiece, or terribly "original", just reasonably attractive and well-designed, and perhaps possess some charming decorative details. We might still have a long way to travel before we build with the same spirit and love of beauty that inspired the magnificent buildings of the early twentieth century, but we've at least turned the corner and left the dreadful post-war period behind us.

Whatever gets done, let's hope it gets done slowly. And most of all, lets work to preserve the beauty and charm our neighborhoods still possess after 65 years of maliciously anti-urban modernist destruction.

Shameless

Pictured above is a condominium at 6212 N North Winthrop I wrote about back in 2008, and it looks like the property has only gone downhill since. This building is a newly-constructed condo with 8 units originally offered at $550,000-$600,000 each, and which has gone through many ownerships. See current snapshot of ownership, above.

This is the worst-looking property for many blocks on N. Winthrop in Edgewater, a street that has undergone a 180-degree transformation over the past 15 years. Many years ago, Winthrop and Kenmore together formed the notorious Winthrop Corridor of drugs, crime, and blight, but since that time, these two streets have become beautiful, placid, tree-lined streets with well-groomed, beautiful houses and buildings in a wide variety of architectural styles.

In this block are many charming old corridor buildings and a number of "four-plus-one" buildings, all offering cheap rentals, yet these places are beautifully landscaped and well-maintained. 6212, on the other hand,, is gleaming new construction with  large, new high-rent apartments, yet it looks seedier every time I walk past it. The weeds are nearly a foot high in the pocket front lawn and on the parkway, where there is also a hole about a foot across and a foot deep, covered only by a barricade lying on its side. There is trash everywhere- on the little lawn, the walk, the parkway, and stuffed, along with piles of last fall's fallen leaves, between the pickets of the wrought-iron perimeter fence.

I was strolling down Winthrop late this afternoon, and was freshly shocked at the appearance of the place. In the course of snapping pictures to document the wretched appearance of the property, I was intercepted by a white male who appeared to be about in his forties, who double-parked his SUV in front of the place, jumped out, and demanded to know what I was doing.

"Are you the owner of this place?" I asked, indicating the building with my hand.

"Yes! I'm the owner!" he exclaimed, puffing his chest out and staring me intently in his "aggressive display" stance.

"Do you realize you have the trashiest-looking property on the street? This property looks horrible, " I said, "what with trash allover it and weeds a foot high. Look at all these cheap little corridor buildings that look so lovely and have such beautiful flowers and plantings, and your place looks like a slum. You're blighting the street."

I suppose he realized that he could not stop me from taking photos. "A good day to you, madam! Have a good day!" he barked.

The guy was utterly shameless. 

This guy clearly isn't troubled by the neighbors' opinions.  We seem to have a larger number of such owners since the Great Housing Rampage and the ensuing glut of newly constructed and converted condos. Either the owners are not paying for the place and are de facto squatters, and aren't going to lift a finger to maintain the place while they wait for their NODs to arrive in the mail (or for the Sheriff to arrive with the movers), or they are slumlords who picked these places up in foreclosure and just want to sit on them till they can flip them. They don't care how their places look or who they rent them to. Twenty years of dramatic neighborhood improvement in Edgewater and Rogers Park is in danger of being reversed by these predatory new owners.

Shame is usually a good method of enforcing local standards of property maintenance on slob owners, but you can't shame the arrogantly shameless. Some owners just have to be coerced, and it's no violation of their property rights to compel conformity with community expectations. Every owner in the area is negatively affected by the neglect and visible deterioration of property in the area. This property is in the 49th Ward, whose alderman is Joe Moore, and a few dozen calls and letters to Moore from irate neighbors disturbed by the litter and weeds might be helpful.