Tag Archives: Chicago

The view of Chicago from New York City

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Chicago still occasionally goes by the nickname of the “Second City,” even though the population of Los Angeles passed it years ago. But which city is the “First City” is in America has been clear for over a century. Recently, “The Urbanist” section of New York magazine focused on Chicago and at least one Chicago critic thought the review was even-handed. This reminded me of two historic links between the two cities:

1. A number of Chicago’s early prominent residents and boosters were transplanted New York residents.

2. New York annexed all the boroughs into the city in the 1890s so that it would keep a population lead over Chicago.

Today, is there really direct competition between the two cities? They both are global cities that rely heavily on finance and trading. Do big companies often choose between these two locations? If I had to quickly point out the biggest differences between the two regions today beyond the obvious (size, location), I might go with culture. New York City is an entertainment and celebrity center in a way that Chicago is not. New York City combines both commerce/industry with glamor while Chicago is hard-working, tough, and Midwestern (which some might consider the opposite of cosmopolitan).

The Chicago Tribune makes a case for land banks

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A number of Rust Belt American cities have lost population in recent decades, including Chicago in the 2000s. A number of strategies have been proposed for what municipalities should do with the buildings and land that is no longer occupied. The Chicago Tribune makes a case for one solution: land banks.

By putting unwanted properties under centralized, local control, land banks fight urban blight. Instead of becoming an eyesore, safety hazard or worse, an abandoned home can be turned into a side lot for another home, or combined with other properties for green space or eventual development.

Municipalities have powers to clean up or knock down unmaintained properties — Chicago is among the best at it. But land banks can make the process more open, efficient and cost-effective…

Done right, land banks can enable cities to clear away unwanted structures and debris, giving the sites around them new life. Over time, parcels can be pieced together for optimal use. In St. Louis, Indianapolis and elsewhere, land banks have shown promise in dealing with properties nobody wants — a number certain to soar with so many homeowners behind on their mortgages.

When people leave and don’t come back, cities need to reorganize. Recent census figures show Detroit and Cleveland at 100-year population lows and falling. They can’t afford to stand pat and hope that somebody — anybody? — moves back in. Chicago lost 200,000 people in the last decade. In Flint, eventually, entire blocks will be cleared, enabling the city to consolidate services, save money and boost efficiency.

The article suggests that realtors are opposed to this in Illinois and this is holding back the legislative process. I wonder who is for or against this idea among the broader spectrum of political, business, and community leaders. I imagine there might be some others who might wonder at the ability of the city to manage all of this land. In this era of budget deficits, would this be expensive in Chicago in the short term? Additionally, the Tribune uses the term “urban blight,” a concept that might remind people of programs after World War II that allowed cities to wipe out affordable and/or ethnic neighborhoods.

The editorial cites a land bank in one other city: Flint, Michigan. Is Chicago in such trouble that it needs to use the same strategies as other Rust Belt cities that tend to draw more attention for population loss and vacant/abandoned/foreclosed properties? The editorial suggests foreclosures are a big problem in Chicago but I haven’t seen data that suggests the city has been hit that hard by foreclosures compared to a number of other places.

Increasing numbers of blacks moving to the suburbs

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One of the important shifts revealed in the 2010 Census is the increasing number of minorities in the American suburbs (also see the thoughts of the 2010 Census director here). This is particularly true of blacks who have moved from the city to the suburbs and this raises some concerns about the future of the neighborhoods they are leaving behind:

Taylor’s decision to live outside Chicago makes him part of a shift tracked by the 2010 Census that surprised many demographers and urban planners: He is among hundreds of thousands of blacks who moved away from cities with long histories as centers of African-American life, including Chicago, Oakland, Washington, New Orleans and Detroit…

Chicago’s population fell by 200,418 from 2000 to 2010, and blacks accounted for almost 89% of that drop. Hispanics surpassed blacks as the city’s largest minority group. Meanwhile, Plainfield grew by 204% overall, and its black population soared by more than 2,000%, the fastest rate in the region…

The trend has broad policy implications: As blacks who can afford to live in the suburbs depart, will cities have enough resources to help the low-income blacks left behind? Will the demand for housing be strong enough to support the revitalization of traditionally black inner-city neighborhoods? How will black churches, businesses and cultural institutions be affected? Will traffic congestion worsen because blacks moving to the suburbs keep their jobs in the city?

Roderick Harrison, a sociologist at Howard University in Washington and a former chief of the racial statistics branch of the Census Bureau, says the changes reflect the improving economic status of some African Americans.

Traffic seems to be a lesser issue compared to some of these bigger questions. And these questions are not new: at least since the 1980s, commentators have been asking about what may happen to urban neighborhoods and institutions when middle-class Blacks leave for the suburbs.

We could also ask about how this might change the suburbs. Are we at the point as a society where suburban residents really just care about social class, i.e. being able to buy into the suburbs and maintain a middle-class lifestyle? Or will whites leave suburban neighborhoods when Blacks move in just as they did in urban neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s? I wrote earlier about how minorities were fitting into Schaumburg, a noted edge city outside of the Chicago, and a noted historian, Thomas Sugrue, suggested that the move of Blacks to the suburbs in the Detroit region may not be all that positive. I suspect there will be a lot of discussions in suburbs about these changes, often couched in terms of issues like affordable housing (see this example from the wealthy Chicago suburb of Winnetka), property values, and the quality of schools.

It is interesting to note that Plainfield is cited in this particular story: Joliet, Plainfield, Aurora, and the suburban region far southwest of Chicago is a booming area. And if you were curious about the African-American growth in Plainfield, it was 0.8% Black in 2000 (110 out of 13,038) and is roughly 6% Black in 2010 (out of 39,581).

Summing up Mayor Daley’s mixed “public housing legacy”

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There wasn’t much talk about public housing before the election earlier this year to replace Mayor Daley in Chicago. (Frankly, there isn’t much talk about this at the federal level either.) But one journalist suggests that Mayor Daley left a “complex public housing legacy” for the new Mayor Emanuel:

Last month, as Richard M. Daley approached retirement, the Chicago Housing Authority released a first-of-its-kind report on residents who were forced to leave the high-rises. It concluded that the changes made life safer, more stable and more hopeful for thousands of families.

But while Daley was praised by some for abandoning the high-rise system, housing advocates say the changes have done little to break the grip of poverty.

“As an urban-development strategy, the transformation is an A. It gets a far poorer grade if it is approached as a strategy to help low-income populations to achieve social and economic stability in their lives,” said Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, who spent 18 months living in Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes as a graduate student in the early 1990s.

Some observers, like author Alex Kotlowitz, fear the disappearance of the high-rises means Chicago’s poverty has passed out of sight and out of mind.

Some of the media talk about public housing in Chicago has been positive: the once notorious high-rises, particularly those at the Robert Taylor Homes on the south side and the Cabrini-Green complex on the north side (see thoughts about the demolition of the last high-rise here, here, here, and here), are now gone. (It was a bit strange last week to ride the Brown Line north out of the Loop and not see any Cabrini-Green high-rises.) In the eyes of the media, the problems of concentrated poverty and crime have been reduced. The land can be put to other uses, particularly at Cabrini-Green as it is very valuable land between Lincoln Park and the Loop.

On the other hand, the concerns of people like Venkatesh and Kotlowitz will not go away. Simply destroying public housing high-rises does not deal with the larger issues: there are still large parts of Chicago where residents have reduced life chances compared to better-off parts of the city. In the article, new Mayor Rahm Emanuel is cited as saying that the goal of reducing the isolation of the public housing residents (the goal that was “short of ending poverty”) has been successful.

I can’t imagine the new mayor will or perhaps even can devote much time to this issue as the persistent problems of budgets, crime, jobs, and education need to be addressed. Still, it will be interesting to see how Emanuel addresses public housing moving forward.

170 options for improving the Eisenhower

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The Eisenhower expressway is a key artery for traffic entering and leaving Chicago. The public is now invited to look at plans, including 170 possible improvements, that have been developed and could be put into practice in the future:

In response, highway design engineers have come up with 170 different ideas to reduce gridlock and accidents on the Eisenhower. The plan also focuses on improving travel options for mass-transit riders and bicyclists and pedestrians using nearby arterial streets…

The possible solutions include widening the Eisenhower to four lanes in each direction for the entire length of the highway to make room for “managed lanes’’ that would handle car-poolers, express buses or drivers willing to pay tolls to commute more quickly during rush hours, according to IDOT planners.

An expansion of CTA Blue Line rail service, from its current terminus in Forest Park to DuPage County, and other new transit services are also on the table, officials said. They include a possible light-rail line and designating a bus-rapid transit corridor that would be open to express buses traveling between the suburbs and downtown at least part of the day…

Major improvements are needed because traffic volumes on the Eisenhower are up to 180,000 vehicles a day, making it one of the busiest and most congested expressways in the Chicago region, officials said.

It sounds like there are a lot of options on the table. As the article notes, this is now an issue because this road is handling much more traffic than was originally intended and the traffic is not just one-way (in to the city in the morning, out in the afternoon) but now goes both directions. I can also imagine that all of this will stir up some discussion: special toll lanes? Construction that will go on for years? More money spent on mass transit? It seems like multiple solutions are needed included getting more drivers off the road as well as improving the traffic flow along this stretch.

Of course, a lot of this is for down the road as the planning has to take place and the money has to be found:

So far funding is available only to continue preliminary engineering, which is expected to be wrapped up in the spring of 2013, officials said. Design would then take several more years.

“Part of our analysis is to examine the financing options,’’ Harmet said. “We are a ways away from construction.’’

While the discussion could just center on the Eisenhower, this could also lead to larger conversations about the role of highways and mass transit within metropolitan regions. If the Eisenhower, and other local highways, are continually issues, perhaps new things have to be tried and transportation has to be dealt with on a more comprehensive level within regions (see a study like this for a broader metropolitan approach).

The important step taken toward American interstates on May 7, 1930

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I am a few days behind in celebrating anniversaries in American transportation history but this post from The Infrastructurist highlights an important highway commission that was founded on May 7, 1930:

This past Saturday marked a little-known anniversary in the long-running contest between American highway and train establishments. On May 7, 1930, the U.S. Senate passed legislation to form the United States Motorways Commission, a twelve-person group — two Senators, two Congressmen, and eight presidential appointees — whose job was to consider a proposal for a national road network strikingly similar to the Interstate Highway System that emerged decades later.

The concept of a truly national road system was, at this point in American history, truly novel. The particular idea to be considered by the motorways commission sprang from the mercurial mind of an engineer named Lester Barlow. The Union Highway, as Barlow first called his system, would be a four-track expressway stretching from Boston to San Francisco. It would have fast lanes and slow lanes, access ramps to eliminate grade crossings, a partition between traffic flows to prevent U-turns, special sections devoted to gas stations and food stands — in short, all the definitive markers of expressways as we know them…

All seemed to be going well after the Senate voted to create the motorways commission on May 7, 1930. Then suddenly the legislation ran into problems. The House of Representatives trapped its version of the bill in a committee, and New York lawmakers did the same. Attempts to revive the plan in subsequent sessions, both federal and local, failed again and again, until the idea faded away.

Tilson later revealed to Barlow the real reason for legislative inaction on the proposal for a national highway system: it had been blocked by the mighty railroad lobby, which feared the loss of passengers and freight to road travel. This reason was confirmed to Barlow at a gathering of New Haven Railroad officials in the fall of 1930. As Barlow later recalled, John J. Pelley, then president of the New Haven, told those in attendance that a poor highway system was in the railroad’s best interest, and that it should do whatever it “practically” could to prevent the development of expressways in America.

This is an important story as it sounds like this commission laid the framework for the Federal Interstate system that began in the mid 1950s. As sociologists, historians, and others would tell you, this Federal shift toward highway construction had a profound impact on suburban development after World War II.

It would be interesting to hear more about the gap between this commission and the Federal Interstate Act of 1956. Of course, there was a Depression and a massive war. But during this time period, a number of government agencies started planning and building roads. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was built in this gap and the states of Ohio and Indiana started constructing connections to this Turnpike. In the Chicago region, a number of highways were under construction by the mid 1950s as the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago recognized the need for such roads. Beyond historical circumstances, was it primarily the railroad lobby that held up Federal support of interstate construction prior to 1956? If so, what was the state of the railroad industry in 1956 and was the Federal government actually behind the times in funding the Interstate system?

The architectural legacy of Mayor Daley

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Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin considers Mayor Richard M. Daley’s architectural legacy in Chicago. Here is Kamin’s conclusion after going over Daley’s hits, mixed results, and misses:

Daley was a great mayor. He was also a flawed mayor. Power enabled him to reshape Chicago. And the abuse of power undermined him—and the cityscape he did so much to uplift.

As Kamin suggests, this will take some years and historical perspective to sort out. Regardless of the final verdict, it will be interesting to see how subsequent mayors try or don’t try to live up to a long-serving Mayor who generally went for big efforts with mixed results.

Chicago’s Fifth Avenue an example of late 1800s growth machine

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Chicago has its own Fifth Avenue but it is the only numbered avenue in the city. Here’s why:

When what is now the East Garfield Park neighborhood became part of the city in 1869, much of the West Side was open prairie.

According to Streetwise Chicago: A History of Chicago Street Names (Loyola University Press, 1988), the street, originally called Colorado Avenue, was renamed in an effort to boost residential and commercial development.

The new name was meant to evoke the prestige of New York’s flashiest shopping strip—a far cry from the modest bungalows, brownstones and warehouses that have come to define the area…

Peter T. Alter, an archivist at the Chicago History Museum, says the name switch happened around 1890, near the time Chicago beat out New York for the right to host the World’s Columbian Exposition fair.

“Perhaps,” Alter notes, “that lessened the idea of Chicago being seen as second to New York City.”

This is a great illustration of a growth machine at work: in order to boost development in what was an undeveloped area, the street name was changed in order to invoke the wealthy street in New York City. Additionally, the name change seems tied to the 1893 Columbian Exposition (see here for a review of The Devil in the White City which describes some of this time period), an important moment in Chicago’s early history that established the booming city as a world-class city. It sounds like boosterism all around.

The mean population center of Illinois is close to Chicago but this wasn’t always the case

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The mean population center of Illinois is relatively close to Chicago:

[B]ased on new data from the U.S. Census, the true center point of Illinois’ population is about 70 miles southwest of Chicago’s bustling Magnificent Mile.

Situated in a corn field east of the intersection of U.S. Route 47 and Illinois Route 113 in Grundy County is the point referred to by the census as the Mean Center of Population for Illinois…

The center point can tell a lot about a state.

It can help explain why Illinois has a state government controlled largely by Chicago politicians.

It can help explain how money gets distributed around the state. It can help explain why some issues — say, gun control — can pit rural interests against urban interests.

“Somewhere close to half the population of the state is within 40 miles of the Loop,” Illinois State University geography professor Mike Sublett said.

This is not too surprising: by far, Chicago is the largest city in the state and the population of the Chicago metropolitan region (2009 estimate of the Illinois portion only – not counting Wisconsin and Indiana populations) is just under 8 million while Illinois’ total population is just over 12.8 million (2010 figures).

But the value of such a measure seems to be not exactly where this mean is located but rather how this population mean has shifted over time. The article goes on to note how the population mean wasn’t always so close to Chicago:

In the 1840s, the center point was located east of Springfield, relatively close to Illinois’ geographical center point in the Logan County community of Chestnut.

But, as Chicago began to grow as an urban center, the population center point began its northward trek along a line nearly mirroring what would become Interstate 55.

The 1880 center of the state’s population was on the south side of Bloomington, near U.S. Route 150 south of where State Farm Insurance Cos. has its Illinois regional office complex.

In 1910, the center moved out of McLean County for the first time in 50 years. The new center was in a farm field just a few miles southeast of Pontiac.

The only time it took a break from its northeasterly trek until recently was in 1940, when the center — then located in Livingston County — briefly moved southward…

The northern movement of the center point also has stalled in recent decades. The 2010 center point near south of Morris in Grundy County is somewhat south of the 2000 and 1990 population centers, located just a few miles away.

Sublett attributes the stall to the rapid growth of Chicago’s western suburbs and the loss of population within the state’s largest city.

“The center point has kind of stagnated. It has just been migrating around Grundy County,” Sublett said.

As I’ve written before regarding the US population mean (see here), the population mean measure seems to make the most sense when placed in a historical context so that people can get a quick look at larger population and migration trends.

I wonder how many Chicago area residents know that the bulk of the state’s early population lived in the central and southern portions of the state and it wasn’t really until the 1840s and 1850s that the population of northeastern Illinois really began to grow and tilt the balance of power in the state.

Exploring the “mail rail” of London

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There seems to be a growing interest in stories about underground spaces below cities. Add another to stories about underground Paris, New York, and Las Vegas: several explorers have documented the “mail rail” system that operated not too long ago beneath London:

Construction of the tunnels began on February 1915 from a series of shaft located along the route. The tunnels were primarily dug in clay using the Greathead shield system, although the connecting tunnels in and around the stations were mined by hand…

It wasn’t until June 1924 that workers began laying the track using 1000 tons of running rail and 160 tons of conductor rail…The line was eventually finished in 1927 with the first letter through the system running on February 1928…

Although initially the system was a success, in its last years of service the line was continually losing money. On the 7th November 2002, Royal Mail announced the line had become uneconomical with losses of £1.2M a day and that they planned to close it should no alternate uses be found. This was to be the death of the Mail Rail with the line from Mount Pleasant to the Eastern Delivery Office closing on the 21st March 2003, the remaining section from the Western District Office to Mount Pleasant following on the 29th. Now it just sits there buried where light cannot reach, rusting away, the trains sleeping silently in and around the stations wanting to be used again. Sadly a dream which we all know will never come true.

I had not known that these sorts of mail systems were in use until so recently. Such systems were not completely unknown in big cities: Chicago had a much more complex system that delivered mail as well as other kinds of freight. In big yet dense cities, these delivery systems could make a lot of sense as it would keep some traffic off the roads and goods could be delivered with little interruption.

I do wonder at times whether current city officials are very knowledgeable about what is underneath their cities. The pictures regarding London’s “mail rail” are quite good and I wonder if they caught anyone off-guard.

With such interesting things underneath so many big cities, it seems that movie and TV writers would have an endless supply of interesting settings where odd things could occur and creatures could roam…