Tag Archives: Chicago

Financially troubled Chicago has to pay out more to reimburse drivers for pothole damage

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Chicago doesn’t have much money these days but it will have even less after reimbursing drivers for potholes:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has ordered the Chicago Department of Transportation to assign all 30 of its pothole crews to main streets on Mondays and Fridays to address scores of potholes in blitzkrieg fashion using a grid system.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported last month that the cash-strapped city has been hit with a blizzard of damage to vehicle claims thanks to a relentless barrage of snow, cold and wild temperature swings that has turned city streets into the surface of the moon.

Since the New Year’s Eve storm that buried Chicago in 23 inches of snow before a record-setting cold snap, CDOT crews have filled roughly 240,000 potholes…

At last week’s City Council meeting alone, there were 543 pothole claims introduced, nearly double the 280 claims introduced last month. During the March City Council meeting last year, there were just 61 pothole claims introduced.

Between paying more to patch potholes plus pay out claims, the cold and snowing weather is costing Chicago more money. It’s too bad this story doesn’t have any monetary figures about the pothole claims. Plus, how much is budgeted each year to pay out these claims and what happens if there is an outlier year (like this year)? Mayor Emanuel is quoted in this story saying this is why the city is trying to pave more streets during warmer months – indeed, constructing streets in certain ways in the first place and maintaining them adequately will cut down on pothole problems down the road. In this case, paying more upfront for the infrastructure of good roads in Chicago could save the city money later.

File Chicago pothole claims here.

Does the South beat out Chicago because of better weather?

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Here is a quick summary of research looking at how weather might affect population changes in Chicago and similarly cold-weather places versus the warmer weather of the South:

Renn pointed me towards the work of Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist and U. of C. grad who’s become one of the most prominent analysts of the American city in the 21st century. And he thinks there’s a strong correlation. He’s got a whole paper on it, in fact: “Smart Growth: Education, Skilled Workers, & the Future of Cold Weather Cities.”

Cities with average January temperatures under 30 degrees Fahrenheit grew in population only one-third as quickly from 1960 to 1990 as did cities with average January temperatures above 50 degrees. The shift of population toward the Sun Belt can also be seen at the state level: while population in the colder 25 states grew 95 percent between 1920 and 1980, the warmer 25 states saw their average population grow 309 percent…

In short, there’s something of a chicken-and-egg question with the air-conditioning solution that Glaeser cites. Adoption of air conditioning, across the South, was slower than you might expect from the weather. Its availability is a well-established boon to the South, but so is being able to power and afford air conditioning.

It’s significant that Enrico Moretti, like Glaeser an economist interested in how knowledge workers cluster in cities and regions, has most recently turned his focus back to the Tennessee Valley Authority. That’s a government project so ingrained in Southern culture that, as a kid, I thought that the Tennessee River was just called the TVA (emphasis mine):

We find that the TVA’s direct productivity effects were substantial. The investments in productive infrastructure resulted in a large increase in local manufacturing productivity, which in turn led to a 0.3% increase in national manufacturing productivity. By contrast, the indirect effects of the TVA on manufacturing productivity were limited. While we do find strong evidence of localized agglomeration economies in the manufacturing sector, our empirical analysis clearly points to a constant agglomeration elasticity. When the elasticity of agglomeration is the same everywhere in the country, spatially reallocating economic activity has no aggregate effects, as the benefits in the areas that gain activity are identical to the costs in areas that lose it. Thus, we estimate that the spillovers in the TVA region were fully offset by the losses in the rest of the country.

The intensely regressive economic (and cultural) practices of the South damned up potential across its old borders; once they began to fall, it created a flood, draining Yankee knowledge, technology, and workers.

While everyone wants to talk about the weather, it isn’t the only factor nor the most important factor in population and economic growth. To suggest this is the case is to rely on strong ecological arguments, perhaps like those made by Jared Diamond in his more popular books. Yes, air conditioning matters but humans were able to live in both the warmer South and colder North before air conditioning or central heating. More broadly, factors like electricity and water (see the recent troubles in the Southwest) matter more and are essential to even having air conditioning in the first place. Thus, the twist of invoking the TVA, an important adaptation to nature, makes the matter all the much more complex: essential infrastructure makes all sorts of other things possible.

My first experience riding Chicago’s Divvy bikes

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On a rare 50 degree Chicago day, I rode Chicago’s Divvy bikes for the first time. I made three relatively short trips: from Ogilvie Transportation Center to the Art Institute, from the Art Institute to Navy Pier, and from Navy Pier to Ogilvie. Here is evidence of my rides:

DivvyBikesChicago

My quick thoughts on the experience:

1. It is fairly easy to pay for and to get the bikes. It costs $7 for an all-day pass and rides under 30 minutes are free. There are lots of Divvy stations in the Loop so finding a stand near major attractions isn’t too hard. While it is a pain to have to wonder where other stations are when on the bike, I’m guessing $7 a day doesn’t cover a GPS with every bike.

2. The bikes themselves worked fine: big tires, nice fenders (otherwise I would have been quite splattered from all of the melting snow), good brakes, seats that are easy to adjust. The bikes only have three gears and this is limiting, but Chicago has a limited number of hills.

3. Riding near Millennium Park and Lake Michigan was easy. Riding in the Loop was not. I can handle it as I learned how to ride the mean streets of suburbia while a teenager (this may sound like a joke but we rode on a number of busy streets). Plus, traffic was pretty light in the middle of the day. However, I have a hard time imagining the average tourist wanting to do this. Some street have bike lanes but the only one I saw that was a protected lane was on Dearborn Street, a north-south street. Madison had a bike lane and I rode back to Ogilvie on Adams in the bike lane but both of these had plenty of double-parked taxis, cars, and buses. While drivers noticed me and took a wide berth, how tolerant would they be of slower groups of riders?

I would do this again, particularly in nice weather, as it is a different way to see the city and it can cut down on the time to get from attraction to attraction (less than 15 minutes biking from Navy Pier to the train). But, riding on busy streets is not for everyone and Chicago has a ways to go before having a street infrastructure that makes it easy for visitors to hop on bikes.

Does Chicago gain anything by Jimmy Fallon taking a polar plunge in Lake Michigan?

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New Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon was in Chicago this past weekend participating in a polar plunge. Does Chicago gain anything by this?

Fallon detailed his experience at Chicago’s Polar Plunge during Monday night’s show, a day after he dipped into icy Lake Michigan.

“I’m never doing that again,” Fallon said.

Fallon said Chicago “didn’t let me fool around” when it came to taking up Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s challenge to take the plunge, which benefits Special Olympics Chicago. The event drew a record number of people.

“I go in, and I hear you’re only supposed to go up to your knees,” he said, recalling running into the lake. “I just plunged back, I went under and a couple bubbles came out and I froze. I just stand up and I took my hat off and my hair turned to icicles, and I heard bagpipes. This is how I went. I thought this was it, I thought it was the end.”

Fallon also shared a gift he received from Emanuel, which declares March 2014 “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Month” in Chicago.

The biggest winner here appears to be the Special Olympics since people donate to participate. Plus, Rahm Emanuel participated because kids read over 2 million books for a Chicago Public Library summer program – reading is good.

But, wasn’t this primarily a publicity stunt for Emanuel as well as Fallon? Emanuel wins by being an active mayor. As Fallon notes in his retelling and shows in a picture, Rahm looks pretty good coming out of the water. Events like this burnish his image as a mayor who gets things done (past Chicago mayors have made similar claims). He helps kids read and cares about others. It doesn’t hurt that a new CNN show “Chicagoland” features him as mayor. Fallon is a new host, replacing Jay Leno. While he takes time out of his schedule to come to Chicago, it is good publicity as he is involved with a charitable cause and is getting out of the New York/Los Angeles bubble that all late night TV shows live in. Maybe the clincher here is Emanuel giving Fallon a resolution saying March is “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Month in Chicago.” Does this mean much of anything?

I’m not sure this all contributes much to Chicago. It suggests some people are willing to donate to Special Olympics – they had over 3,200 participants this year, no doubt boosted by Emanuel and Fallon’s presence. Chicago is a charitable city or a star-struck city? The polar plunge highlights the weather in Chicago, particularly in a season nearing record ice cover on Lake Michigan. On the whole, Chicagoans like to put on an exterior of tough people who can survive the weather, particularly when interacting with people from other places, but there is plenty of grumbling. But, is a polar plunge likely to bring in new tourists or help companies decide to move to Chicago?

(I realize this might be a grumpy take on a lighthearted event with some human interest appeal. However, this event got a lot of attention beforehand and afterwards and I wanted to think about how Chicago makes out in the whole situation.)

100 years of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago poem

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One hundred years ago, Carl Sandburg published a famous poem about Chicago:

For its issue of March 1914, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine accepted Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” and seven of his other poems about the city…

And a city — in the first five lines of the work of an obscure socialist poet in a 2-year-old magazine founded by a Chicago Tribune art critic — had found its enduring descriptors…

“The poem was absolutely revolutionary when it first came out,” says Bill Savage, who teaches the poem as a distinguished senior lecturer in English at Northwestern University…

“They have a kind of omnipresence that makes it a little bit difficult for us to think and feel our way back to how original and daring this was,” Polito says. “You show something like ‘Citizen Kane’ to a group of young students. The techniques of that film have been imitated so many times, they don’t see what was startling about it. That’s a little bit true here. It’s a little bit hard for us a hundred years later to recapture. It’s almost as if it’s a combination of the Book of Genesis and the national anthem for Chicago. It’s the founding myth and the celebratory lyric.”

Reading this, it strikes me that this poem is really well-known in the Chicago area because residents feel like like it embraces all the contradictions that they enjoy (or at least acknowledge) about the city. But, is this poem well-known elsewhere? The article suggests academics elsewhere often didn’t think highly of Sandburg’s work. Is their a poetic equivalent for New York (perhaps the recent Jay-Z and Alicia Keys hit “Empire State” might be a modern version?) or Los Angeles? If so, perhaps I wouldn’t know as I’ve only really heard of Sandburg’s poem…

Exploring the meanings of Chicago’s underground Pedway

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A Chicago artist and teacher has spent years exploring and analyzing Chicago’s large underground Pedway:

You want to know the best thing about the Chicago Pedway? It’s not that, despite this Polar Vortex winter, you can cover almost 40 city blocks on the Pedway without ever stepping foot outside. It’s not that the Pedway began modestly in 1951 and now stretches through the North Loop, jogs beneath Millennium Park and ventures as far east as the mouth of the Chicago River. It’s not that the Pedway could be regarded as a kind of yardstick of municipal progress, always seeming as though it might extend just a little bit longer someday. It’s not even that the Pedway’s generally mundane, charm-free hallways offer little to see — look, another “For Rent” sign! — and therefore it works perfectly as a daily treadmill for ambulatory meditation…

Where you see putty-colored corridors leading to a job in a cubicle farm, she sees dreams of the American frontier. You pass convenience stores selling gum; Tsen, 38, a native of Cambridge, Mass., passes through a long, winding metaphor for a Chicago never realized — “the by-product of projected futures,” she writes in “The Pedway of Today,” her new, perversely compelling guidebook/consideration of the Pedway’s cultural meanings.

Indeed, Tsen, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and photography/video teacher at Wilbur Wright College on the Northwest Side, has come to see the longtime walkway as her canvas. About four years ago, the Chicago artist — and former Wendella Boat tour guide, who says travel and The Path Not Taken have become the preoccupations of her art — began offering tours of the Pedway (she has since stopped). But she never charged her audiences, she said, because the tours would also quietly double as performance art, as free-associative strolling lectures in which your guide (Tsen) would dole out not dates or landmarks but thoughts on Jules Verne, revolving doors and how the Pedway is like Florence…

Eventually she stumbled across an entrance to the Pedway in the back of the Renaissance lobby, the path itself so low-key that you can see it every day without quite recognizing it. “The Pedway struck me not as the frontier that I had been looking for but a reminder of the glamour of early cities and a promise of future frontiers.” At this point in her guide Tsen asks readers to imagine that it’s 1893 and — though the Renaissance was built a century later — they are relaxing in the lobby before returning home from the World’s Fair, where they “attended Frederick Jackson Turner’s fabled lecture ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ … still pondering his words: ‘The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American History.”

Sounds like a very interesting and interpretive tour. All sorts of large infrastructure and urban projects would benefit from people who know them well enough and are enthusiastic about what they offer to share it with others.

If Chicago tried to advertise the Pedway more, would regular users complain that too many tourists are clogging the passages a la New Yorkers and the subway?

Chicago’s race and class differences on display in fight over Obama Library

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Six groups are vying for the Barack Obama Presidential Library in Chicago:

The library is “such a prize that nobody is going to yield power to anybody else,” veteran Chicago political analyst Don Rose said.The squabble also puts Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, in the difficult position of trying to present a single, unified bid, lest the feuding weaken the city’s odds against rival campaigns to put the library in New York or Hawaii…

The main point of tension is between the University of Chicago, where Obama spent 12 years as a constitutional law professor until his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate, and a group advocating for Bronzeville, the city’s historic center of black culture, business and politics.

“They think that they can get whatever they want,” Bronzeville organizer Harold Lucas said of the university. “If you compare the cranes in the sky and that opulent growth of this university to the surrounding, predominantly African-American community, it’s a travesty. It’s a clear tale of two cities.”…

There are also two potential bids on the Far South Side, one led by Chicago State University and the other by a group promoting the historic Pullman neighborhood. It was in those areas that Obama established his earliest roots in the city as a community organizer in the mid-1980s, setting up job training programs and defending the rights of public housing tenants.

The University of Illinois at Chicago, on the Near West Side, is also taking a shot, as is a real estate developer pushing the former U.S. Steel Corp. site on the southeast lakefront.

Lots of interested actors and a number of them could make a good case that the library would help economic development – even the University of Chicago says their plan would be to build the library off-campus so it would help a neighborhood. This seems like a classic situation for some backroom deals and a growth machine perspective where those with more political and business power will end up calling the shots.

Is this a true test of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s abilities as a mayor? It will be interesting to see how he moves among all of these options.

Adding the Chicago Spire to the Chicago skyline

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New tall buildings may be exciting but they can dramatically alter a skyline. See what the revived Chicago Spire would do to the Chicago skyline:

The supertall skyscraper’s hasn’t quite had a Cinderella story, as the project has gone through name, design and ownership changes since it was conceived in 2005. If completed, the 2,000 foot building would become the tallest structure in the Western Hemisphere.

The various proposals are quite interesting. Two things to note, beyond the proposed height:

1. The Spire has a unique location that helps it stand out from other buildings in the skyline. It is positioned in front, closer to the lakefront and Navy Pier than other tall buildings in Chicago which are closer to the business district or Michigan Avenue.

2. The design helps it stand out as skinny, unusual because of its twists, and unusually tall.

Contrast this with the last major addition to the Chicago skyline, the Trump Tower:

TrumpToweronChicagoRiver

While the Trump Tower dominates the approach in and out of the Chicago River, it is near a bunch of other taller buildings and it has a more traditional design (glass and steel in stacked sections). In contrast, the Spire stands out in front of other skyscrapers and has a more unique design.

If built (and this is still a big if), how long before the Spire becomes a “normal” part of the Chicago skyline? How will it actually cohere with the rest of the skyline?

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.