Category Archives: Places

Blagojevich wins round 1

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While sitting in the Atlanta airport waiting to return to Chicago, I saw the big news of today live on CNN: Rod Blagojevich wins round 1 as he is convicted on only 1 of 24 counts brought against him by the federal government.

Amazing.

The jurors started speaking tonight. According to the foreman:

But in the end, he said, the “lack of a smoking gun” was too much of a hurdle for jurors to reach more than the one unanimous decision.

And the charge of trying to selling the Senate seat might have been held up by one juror:

[A young juror] said a female juror who was the lone holdout on convicting Blagojevich of attempting to sell the Senate seat “wanted clear-cut evidence, and not everything was clear-cut.”

The court proceedings will continue.

And what does this mean for the State of Illinois, politics, and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald?

Behind the curtain of the Bozo show

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The Bozo show was a long-time institution on Chicago television. The clown, televised on WGN, started on the air in 1960 and spread to stations around the country.

A new book commemorates the 50th anniversary of the show’s beginning. Among the stories in the book:

The Chicago show was so popular, Susan Harmon confirmed, that mothers would sign up for tickets the day their child was born, so six or seven years later, or even longer (at one time, there was a 10-year wait), their kid could attend the show.

Now that good evidence about the local impact of the show.

I attended the show when I was younger after seeing it for years on TV. (I have photographic evidence that I will not share here.) I’m pretty sure my mom got tickets from someone at work. I don’t remember much about the experience…but it was probably fun.

Hotbed for exports is…Wichita?

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The Financial Times reports that according to a Brookings Institution study, Wichita has the highest percentage of exports of any metropolitan region in the country:

Thanks to a cluster of aircraft manufacturers such as Learjet, Cessna and Hawker Beechcraft, the economic focus of Wichita – population 366,000 – is very different from the emphasis on services and consumer demand typical of 21st century America. According to a study published late last month by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, nearly 28 per cent of the city’s gross metropolitan product is sold abroad. That makes it the most export-oriented in the country, just ahead of Portland, Oregon – noted for its computer and electronics companies – and San Jose in California’s Silicon Valley.

Wichita is not who I would think is leading this list. But the article goes on to say that Wichita and some other places have figured out how to move beyond two lagging sectors of the economy, consumer goods and housing, to move forward. For the rest of the country’s economy to move forward, they may have to follow Wichita’s model.

NPR on New Orleans: Still a long way to go

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In a story that has slowly faded away, NPR looks again at New Orleans. The verdict: “the city’s health is much improved” but there is still much to be done. Top on the list of things to do: encourage economic growth that will continue to draw new residents and redevelopment.

Changing dumpsters into swimming pools

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In New York City, officials are hosting a summer program that includes swimming pools made out of dumpsters.

This is the kind of creative thinking that many cities could benefit from. Of course, it only sounds like there are a few of these pools being run by the city and they are each quite small. However, it is a clever reuse of a common object to bring some joy into summer life in the city. And the designer suggests they are cheap to put together.

Walgreens and food deserts in Chicago

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Chicago Breaking Business reports that Walgreens is about to unveil expanded food offerings in a South Side store in Chicago. The expanded food line at 10 Walgreens stores is part of an effort to help combat the city’s food deserts:

The stores will offer more than 750 new food items such as fresh fruits and vegetables, frozen meat and fish, pasta, rice, beans, eggs and whole-grain cereals. The Deerfield-based drug store chain said it was approached by Mayor Richard Daley last year to bring more healthy food to areas that the city has identified as food deserts, namely neighborhoods that lack supermarkets.

Large American cities often struggle with this issue: low-income neighborhoods that have little or no access to fresh and healthy food. If the only options available are buying food from a convenient store or gas station, it is more expensive and less healthy. In the long run, this has consequences for building wealth and public health.

The rise of “smart growth”

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Reuters reports on “smart growth” initiatives across the United States with Rockville, Maryland as a prime example. With a weakened economy, more buyers seem to prefer locations closer to downtowns where they can walk, more easily access amenities, and avoid some of the pitfalls of suburban sprawl.

From the article:

Rockville’s renaissance over the past four years shows how the shift toward urban-style living has reached the suburbs. And urban planners insist the trend has legs.

Dubbed “smart growth,” the movement favors the development of a mix of housing and businesses in and near existing cities. At the same time, it discourages the Topsy-like growth of peripheral suburbs, known disparagingly as “sprawl.”

“Sprawl” is a term commonly used to describe the suburbs. It implies automobile dependence, spread out houses, strip malls, big box stores, and a lack of open space. In contrast, “smart growth” offers something different: more dense development, mixed-use development, more thought-through development principles, and a lessened reliance on automobiles.

More suburban communities seem to desire “smart growth,” particularly to help revive their downtowns. This translates into certain development goals: building around existing transportation facilities (like railroads), constructing condos and more dense residential units, and seeking to attract dining, retail, and entertainment uses that can expand a downtown from just a place to errands in during the day.

h/t The Infrastructurist

Walking the entire Amazon

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A British man recently completed an impressive walk: the entire length of the Amazon. The journey took two and a half years and he is supposedly the first human to make the entire hike.

I am slightly amazed that there are still feats like this left to accomplish. Even as we often think of ourselves as very modern people, there are parts of the Earth that we still know little about or few people have ever seen.  The journey drew the attention of another famous explorer:

His feat earned the praise of no less an adventurer than Sir Ranulph Fiennes, a fellow Briton whom the Guinness Book of World Records describes as the “world’s greatest living explorer.”

“To do all this in more than 800 continuous days with just a backpack puts Stafford’s endeavor in the top league of expeditions past and present,” Fiennes wrote on Stafford’s website.

Remarkable – and it sounds like he had many interesting experiences along the way.

Summer heat and society

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The heat of the summer is often equated with positive things: sun, outdoor activities, the beach, and driving with the windows open or convertible top down.

But the heat can also cause and expose issues in a society. In Russia, there has been record heat and a staggering number of deaths:

On Monday, Moscow health authorities announced that the number of deaths each day in the capital had nearly doubled to 700 as most of central Russia entered the seventh week of a heat wave. The high temperatures, hovering around 100 degrees, have destroyed 30% of the nation’s grain crops and triggered massive peat bog and forest fires that alone have killed more than 50 people and devastated dozens of villages.

Andrei Seltsovsky, chief of Moscow’s health department, said the city’s morgues were filled almost to capacity, with 1,300 of the 1,500 slots taken. He suggested that residents, instead of following Russian Orthodox tradition of holding burials on the third day after death, bury loved ones sooner.

This sort of event is not isolated to Moscow. Something similar happened in Chicago in 1995. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote about the summer in the book Heat Wave: Social Autopsy of a Disaster in Chicago. In an interview, Klinenberg discussed the book. There were some controversy over the “official death count.” Cook County’s chief medical examiner reported 465 deaths related to the heat for the hottest week but the numbers were disputed by Mayor Daley.

Additionally, the death rates differed by race:

The actual death tolls for African Americans and whites were almost identical, but those numbers are misleading. There are far more elderly whites than elderly African Americans in Chicago, and when the Chicago Public Health Department considered the age differences, they found that the black/white mortality ratio was 1.5 to 1. Another surprising fact that emerged is that Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths.

So heat can help expose the disadvantaged in society, those who have no or little access to air conditioning, are often alone, and have no one to check in on them. Since that summer in Chicago, the city has opened “cooling centers” (which are available now all over the state of Illinois) to provide a place for those who don’t have other options. Measures like these have cut down on heat-related deaths in Chicago – it remains to be seen what Moscow will do to help with this current and future heat waves.

Farming back on the upswing in Massachusetts

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Farming is not a common occupation in the United States today. According to these figures from the EPA, less than 1% of Americans claim farming as an occupation and about 2% of people live on farms.

Yet the Boston Globe reports that farming is on the upswing in Massachusetts. According to the figures:

From 2002 to 2007, the number of farms in Massachusetts jumped by about 27 percent to 7,691, according to the US Department of Agriculture census. That’s a reversal from the previous five years, when there was a 20 percent drop in the number of farms and, presumably, farmers, many of whom sold land to developers.

But the start-up farms are smaller than the family enterprises of the past. The average farm in Massachusetts, 85 acres in 2002, was 67 acres five years later.

American society experienced such a shift away from agriculture from the late 1800s to today that I wonder if this is part of a shift toward a slightly more balanced world between agriculture and other sectors of society. There are plenty of books and pundits talking about how we are disconnected from the land and our food – perhaps a new generation is listening (and the article does make it sound like many of the new farmers are younger) and charting a new course.

(Even after an upswing, the number of farms in Massachusetts is still small. A lot more people would need to go into agriculture to become a movement.)