Author Archives: legallysociable

Building Chicago its first “true backlot” as filming days grow

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Cinescape recently announced plans to expand their Chicago backlot which is featured on several current shows:

Cinespace, the soundstage complex on the West Side that is home to TV shows such as NBC’s “Chicago Fire” and ABC’s upcoming midseason drama “Mind Games,” plans to expand its filmmaking options by building a backlot on its existing 58-acre campus…

“We’re going to put the facades right on the existing buildings,” says Pissios. “One street will be a row of New York brownstones. One will be Chinatown. Another will be a restaurant, a bank and a courthouse.

“So this will help TV and film productions when I can say, ‘This will save you money.’ We have a solid film (tax) incentive but it’s not the best in the country. And there’s big costs when you shoot on location — moving all the trucks, setting up catering, closing streets off, which requires security people. So how about when you’re here, I give (you) the option to just shoot everything on our 58 acres? Instead of going to 19th and Michigan Ave. to shoot those brownstones, they could shoot it right here…

L.A. is currently the only U.S. city with true backlots, so one in Chicago would be unique. Pissios plans to start the project in the fall, with work expected to be completed about a year later. “And if everything goes well, we would love to somehow, down the line, make this a little tourist attraction, where buses could come in and we give people a tour.”

It is a little bit funny that the expanded backlot would help provide settings for other cities. Why not a full backlot of Chicago scenery? At the same time, Chicago has had more film and TV shooting in the city so perhaps this doesn’t matter too much, particularly if the alternative is for people to go to Toronto or Vancouver to shoot “Chicago.” The city set a record in 2013 for the most filming days in the city:

The number of film and television projects filmed in Chicago, jumped 20 percent in 2013 to 2,198 filming days, according to the Chicago Film office.

City officials said it was a new record high, trumping 2012’s 1,808 days.

The filming hours include six simultaneous full-time TV series, three studio features shot back-to-back and 137 commercials…

TV series shooting in Chicago during 2013 included ABC’s “Betrayal” and “Mind Games” as well as NBC’s “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago PD” and “Crisis.” USA’s “Sirens” also shoots in Chicago.

Studio features filmed in Chicago in 2013 included “Divergent,” “Jupiter Ascending” and “Transformers 4.” All three will be released in 2014.

Good for business but how Chicago are these movies/shows/commercials anyway? Are there lots of shots of iconic Chicago buildings or more of a Chicago culture or not much at all?

Chicago’s annexations through the years

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Watch Chicago expand through annexation here.

Maps at the Chicago History Museum show that in 1837, city borders were:

  • Lake Michigan to the east
  • North Avenue to the north
  • 22nd Street to the south
  • Wood Street to the west

In the Great Fire of 1871, much of the city was destroyed. The most significant annexation in Chicago history came almost two decades later, in 1889.

That’s when Hyde Park, Lake View and Jefferson and Lake townships became part of Chicago. The annexations were the result of an election and added 125 miles and 225,000 people to the city, making it the nation’s largest city by square mileage at the time…

“One of the reasons annexation stops […] in the early 1900s is because the city really doesn’t want to annex any more territory,” said Chicago historian Ann Keating, who wrote Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide and co-edited The Encyclopedia of Chicago. “Our vision is suburban communities wouldn’t want to join in to the city, but the fact of the matter is the city kind of hits a point where they can no longer extend services.”

This is a common trait of most American big cities: they started relatively small and then annexed quite a bit of territory. However, Chicago’s experience mirrors cities in the North which essentially couldn’t annex much past 1900. While suburbs prior to this point had been willing to join the city to gain from the big city’s services and the city’s prestige, by around 1900 these local services were cheaper to build themselves and cities had different reputations. But, annexation was still quite common for Sunbelt cities, most of whom were able to continue to annex through the 20th century. David Rusk tracks these annexations in his book Cities Without Suburbs. Here is one chart:

RuskCitiesWithoutSuburbsTable1.5Quite a big difference which Rusk argues allowed Sunbelt cities to capture more of the suburban growth and benefit from a wider tax base and more diverse population.

Super Bowl byproduct: first regional mass transit map for New York City

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The Super Bowl prompted officials to put together a regional mass transit map for New York City for the first time:

Festivities for the big game are spread between Manhattan’s Times Square, Newark’s Prudential Center, and the MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands. So getting around by public rail involves, depending on your route, the PATH, NJ Transit, the MTA subway, the Long Island Railroad or even Amtrak.

To make life easier, the New York/New Jersey Super Bowl Committee asked designer Yoshiki Waterhouse of Vignelli Associates to merge all the systems onto one diagram.

The result is the closest thing the New York City area has to an all-in-one rapid transit map. The host committee has been passing them out to fans and media and has made it available online. But if you’re a regular New Jersey to Manhattan commuter, or just a design fan, you should probably get your hands on one of one these before they end up as an expensive collector’s item.

While there are clearly a lot of things going on in this map, it doesn’t make much sense that this is the first full transit map. (Technically, it doesn’t include buses but that is another story.) Why might this be? One assumption could be that the average visitor or tourist isn’t terribly interested in leaving New York City on a typical visit. Plenty of visitors might want to go to Brooklyn but how many want to take a train to Long Island or the Prudential Center in New Jersey? Another answer could be that for trips within New York City, the city and others clearly see the subway as the only way to go because of its efficiency and coverage.

“Without Lake Mead, there would be no Las Vegas”

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The 14 year drought in southern Nevada, northern Arizona, and southern California threatens Lake Mead and the water supply to Las Vegas and other communities. The ability to have such a city in the middle of a desert is quite remarkable. It rests on the construction of Hoover Dam:

HooverDamJul12

I’ve been there twice and I was impressed both times by the ability to put this all together in the 1930s. Yet, the dam is highly dependent on available water and weather patterns. Here is a look at the lower Lake Mead from the top of Hoover Dam in July 2012:

LakeMeadJul12

While this is partly a cautionary tale about the the limits of human consumption, it also presents an opportunity for human ingenuity. As the news report notes, “Las Vegas actually reuses 93% of its water.” Imagine if all cities in the world reached such levels. Thus, even with an extended drought, Las Vegas may continue to thrive:

BellagioFountainsJul12

The show must go on…

Parody: Nazi leader loses the equity in his McMansion as the housing bubble bursts

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One of the YouTube parodies of the 2004 German movie Downfall features Hitler lamenting the effect of the declining housing market on his new McMansion. Here is a small part of Hitler’s complaints:

Real estate only goes up! My broker told me it only goes up! I cannot believe I’m going to have to sell my house before I can flip it for a profit. That bimbo said I could always refinance before the rates went up! I’m going to have to sell assets to raise cash. I’ll love my vintage Camaro SS! I got that car with my home equity loan along with my flatscreen TV and a bunch of other toys!

Question from military official: But you didn’t put any money down, how can you complain?

Response: Everyone was doing it! I needed a nice car and a new television!

Question from the same official: What about all the people who lived within their means?

Response: Screw them. I invested in that house to live the life of luxury I am entitled to! There was equity in the house! I thought that renters and conservative homeowners were suckers for not jumping on the credit gravy-train. I was going to flip it and my investment would double!

And on it goes. Some interesting commentary on the housing bubble. Of course, the housing bubble didn’t just affect McMansion owners but they are often blamed for inflating the market with big houses and big mortgages that they couldn’t afford. Putting these words in the mouth of the most recognized evil person in recent human memory only serves to drive home the argument…

Looking more at the human-pet relationship in sociological analysis

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A new sociological study suggests more sociologists need to see pets as social actors:

In a new paper published earlier this month in the British journal Sociology, Charles argues that “the so-called species barrier” has long concealed the important kinship between humans and their pets. Her recent research suggests that it’s a bond that should have long ago figured into sociological analysis.

A recent survey in the U.S. revealed “that 91 per cent of pet ‘owners’ regard their pets as family members.” In Australia, Charles writes, 88 percent do. While some researchers may scoff at the notion that this type of relationship rises to any level of complexity, pet owners’ own recent qualitative descriptions also seem to offer compelling contradictory evidence.

This relationship, as Charles notes, isn’t new. It just hasn’t been probed in the way one would expect. Pet-keeping, as we conceive of it today, was first popularized in the 16th and 17th centuries, as urbanization shifted the human-animal relationship “from function to affect.”…

She believes that animals have consistently been treated, to some degree, “as social actors.” But the evidence for that kind of theory is mounting, she argues. “Thus, in a recent study of family formation and kinship networks, a significant number of people spontaneously included animals in their families; this was a particularly interesting finding as interviewees had not been explicitly asked about animals.”

On one hand, this sounds reasonable: lots of people have lots of interactions with their pets. On the other hand, what exactly are members of the American Sociological Association section on Animals and Society studying if they haven’t considered some of this…

How the history of mannequins reveals sociological changes in American society

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You might not think to look to mannequins to learn about significant changes in American society:

Mannequins have a rich century-old history. They’re what Dr. Marsha Bentley Hale, one of the world’s leading experts on mannequins, calls “significant sociological reflections of our consumer society.”…

– Until the early 1900s, the most common mannequins had no head, arms or legs. But by 1912, with the rise of mass production clothing, full-fledged human figures became popular.

– During the Depression era, mannequins were inspired by Hollywood starlets as many Americans took refuge in movie theaters, according to Eric Feigenbaum, chair of the visual merchandising department of LIM College, a fashion college in New York City. But during World War II, the displays took on a somber tone to reflect more subdued fashions, he says.

– After World War II, mannequins started looking playful again. But sexuality was squelched during the 1940s and the 1950s. In fact, many American retailers removed the nipples of the older mannequins because they were considered too sexual, says Dr. Hale.

Read on to reach the present day where there are more realistic mannequins. I wish there was more analysis here to further explain how mannequins reflect American ideals and perceptions about the body. Plus, are there big differences in mannequins aimed at men or women or in different class settings (like differences between cheaper clothing lines versus higher-end retailers)?

Harvard historian addresses McMansions and inequality

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A historian in Harvard’s Business School discusses McMansions and its connections to inequality in an extended conversation here. Some good stuff in this conversation including how top-end consumers are driving the recent comeback of McMansions, a shout-out to sociologist Thorstein Veblen and his idea of “conspicuous consumption,” the idea of a national consumption tax, and how capitalism finds a way to move forward, including creating some inequality.

This is a reminder of the kind of smart and lively conversation that is possible on public radio…

Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker on the difficulty of sociology

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The authors of Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics are primarily interested in economics but they do make occasional mention of sociology. Here is one example involving the Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker describing his own life (page 15 of the deluxe edition):

“I began to lost interest in economics during my senior (third) year because it did not seem to deal with important social problems. I contemplated transferring to sociology but found that subject too difficult Fortunately, I decided to go to the University of Chicago for graduate work in economics. My first encounter in 1951 with Milton Friedman’s course on microeconomics renewed my excitement.”

Two things stand out:

1. Sociology is about social problems. This is a long-standing part of the discipline and the reason many introductory level college classes in sociology are about social problems. At the same time, this tends to portray sociology as more as an activist discipline – which it may be, depending on who you talk to – and less of a scientific enterprise.

2. Though he doesn’t say why, Becker suggests sociology was “too difficult.” From a smart guy, this is a nice hint that sociology isn’t just common sense. Society, groups, interactions, and individuals influencing each other leads to a complex set of theories and methods.

Examples of old infrastructure in America

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Popular Mechanics has some examples of “the oldest working infrastructure” in American cities:

Water System: Philadelphia Water Department. The City of Brotherly Love has one of the oldest water systems in the United States. While the pipe that broke two weeks ago was built in 1895, the average age of a Philly water line is 78 years, and the wastewater lines average 100 years old, according to the city’s water department. Eighty-seven percent of the more than 3000 miles of water mains are made of cast iron, which was the preferred building material until the 1960s. Drawing water from the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, the system supplies 1.5 million Philadelphia residents. The mains are supposed to function properly for 100 to 120 years. The Philadelphia Water Department is still investigating what caused the most recent break…

Concrete Road: Court Avenue, Bellefontaine, Ohio. Using concrete as a road surface was unheard of in the late 1800s, until George Bartholomew pioneered its use by paving Court Ave. in Bellefontaine, Ohio. Bartholomew learned about cement production in Germany and San Antonio, then moved to Bellefontaine because of the neraby deposits of limestone and clay, the two main ingredients in cement. He had to fork over a $5000 bond to convince the city council to let him pave the square around the town’s courthouse, guaranteeing that the concrete would last at least five years. To preserve the historic avenue, Bellefontaine closed the street to traffic in the late 20th century but reopened it because of the traffic and parking problems the closure caused. Court Avenue is still open to light-vehicle traffic, but a statue of Bartholomew at the end of the street keeps trucks off the concrete…

Hydroelectric Power Plant: Mechanicville Hydroelectric Plant. The Mechanicville Power Station sits perched on the Hudson River about 20 miles east of Schenectady. It was built in 1897 to provide power to Schenectady’s burgeoning industry, and today is the oldest three-phase power plant still in operation in the United States. The system uses two three-phase, 40-cycle 32,000-volt circuits, and each of these operates at 6000 kw. These circuits are each capable of handling the station’s entire output, so that service is uninterrupted if one of them goes down. Each of the seven generators runs at 40 Hz and provides 750 kw.

Old infrastructure isn’t necessarily bad if it is well maintained and still meets modern needs. Why, those Romans built aqueducts that have lasted thousands of years – can’t some of our infrastructure do the same? Actually, this brings to mind the David Macaulay book Motel of the Mysteries where a future archeologist discovers a long-lost American hotel room and comes to some interesting interpretations. What exactly will survive from our society?