The City of Chicago Mayor’s Office of Special Events has just announced the presentations being offered for Great Chicago Places and Spaces this year. I am honoured to have been asked to make three separate walking tour presentations for this event, which will occur on Saturday, May 16.
Chicago's Loop, looking over the Northwestern Station Yards
In Secret Streets of Chicago’s Loop; streets like Monroe, LaSalle and Jackson are quintessentially part of Chicago’s Loop, just as are streets like Garland, Couch, Marble and Arcade. Let’s find these streets and learn about the significant events that happened there. This presentation will take place at 945AM and registration is available at the Chicago Architecture Foundation on the day of the tour.
Coaling Tower, C&NW RR 40th Street Yards (GCPS 2006)
Great Train Stations of Clinton Street occurs at 12 noon. The train stations of Clinton Street – the Old Post Office, Union Station, Northwestern Station (Olgivie Transportation Center) and the CTA Clinton / Lake Green Line and the CTA Clinton / Blue Line Stations have always played an important role in Chicago’s Development. See the stations of the past and present, and let’s glimpse at what the future holds in store.
The presentation of Just a Bit of Chicago’s Transit Archaeology takes place at 2PM. What is this lost wall, this crooked building, this odd thing in the river, this old sign? Remnants of a lost civilization? No: Chicago is loaded with all sorts of Archaeology of past transit systems. let’s look at this one part that ran up to the Loop. On my suggestion, some of this tour was previewed by Geoffrey Baer in a telecast of “Ask Geoffrey” during an episode of Chicago Tonighton WTTW-TV last January.
The two afternoon presentations “Great Train Stations of Clinton Street” and “Just a Bit of Chicago’s Transit Archaeology” require advance registration, which will be available online at www.greatchicagoplaces.us starting Tuesday, April 21. In previous years, both of these presentations sold out early.
Great Chicago Places and Spaces offers a cornucopia of other terrific presentations, most of which are not offered other times of the year. Some presentations are aimed specifically at children and families. More information is available at www.greatchicagoplaces.us
A recent article by Paul Kaihla in BUSINESS2.0 Magazine brought me to think about the parking lot as a prolific, yet endangered landscape feature of the post war era.
The article, entitled The Next Real Estate Boom (November 1, 2005) spoke of a coming wave of expansion, growth and redevelopment of American cities, of a scale not seen since the decade immediately following the Second World War, to accommodate 70 million more people. It congealed several concepts that aren’t terribly out of the realm of imagination – “megapolitans” infilling the areas between cities, such as one urban unit consisting of Seattle and Portland; in a way, not unlike how Baltimore / Washington are being reported as a single census unit today. It predicted that existing neighbourhoods may be infilled, perhaps densified, to allow for energy conservation. In my estimation, this type of growth would require a similar movement to preserve agricultural lands, in order to feed the additional hordes of people. A quirky snippet from the article is what caught my eye, concerning the redevelopment potential of surface parking lots in American cities.
They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique / And a swinging hot spot Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone
They paved paradise / And put a parking lot
Joni Mitchell, big yellow taxi
Parking lots have been somewhat of a fascination, if not an icon of post war growth. More people became mobile, we came to expect large, convenient surface areas where we could park our flamboyantly styled yacht of sheet metal, as if to put of symbol of status on display for all to see while we engaged in some activity of commerce within close walking distance. Like them or not, parking lots were an important component to the generation of gross national product. While many times they were our bane – like when Life Magazine declared a hillside completely paved in asphalt as being one of the worst urban eyesores of the year; they achieved an undercurrent of recognition and appreciation in other, equally artistic circles.
"The Spike" car sculpture that graced the parking lot of the Cermak Shopping Plaza has since been demolished.
“Thirty Four Los Angeles Parking Lots” by Beat Era guru Edward Ruscha elevated expanses of empty pavement to high art – a quite random pattern of oil spots that were actually well organized. One winner of the 1978 “McDonald’s of the Future” design competition if the American Institute of Architecture Students realized their design was to place a building seen behind a backdrop of cars in a parking lot, so that parked cars were arranged with the same care and fashion as one would expect to see soup cans placed in a supermarket display. Even our own Cermak Shopping Plaza in Berwyn, Illinois turns a parking lot into a glamorous art gallery.
Quite properly, some may begin to wonder just what has happened to our sense of art, if we see surface parking lots as being our highpoint of artistic expression.
True, the sort of vehicles we park these days all tend to look like everyone else’s, even automotive interiors are rarely offered in vibrant colours like they once were. It’s imaginable that the want to display our vehicle has gone by the wayside. Perhaps lengthening commutes have made driving more drudgery than pleasure, we’re not as attached to our automobiles as we once were. And perhaps time has come to rethink the parking lot. The Chicago area has several examples of what can be done if a portion of the parking lot is developed into a parking garage that can hold at least as many vehicles as once parked on the surface, and the remainder of the site redeveloped as something else. The parking lot’s sense of scale is what’s most intriguing; by tract standards, they are relatively small, lending themselves to development by smaller, private groups, much the same entrepreneurial spirit that saw to their initial development. What’s more, parking lots are usually well located, their location is handy to urban amenities.
Joni Mitchell’s lyrics bring to mind a quote Prince Charles once made about London tabloid newspaper; how they took perfectly wonderful wooded forests, and cut down all the trees to process into pulp newsprint that in turn became Fleet Street tabloids that printed stories of dubious gossip. In our case, the original landscape that was turned into surface parking lots may not be salvageable. However, the integration of parking lots into worthwhile neighbourhoods is akin to turning the proverbial sow’s ear into a silk purse.
Carl Schurz High School, Chicago. Dwight Perkins, Architect
The late British architectural historian Reynar Banham was fascinated with the Industrial Era. He charted the course of various mechanical inventions to show how they changed the architectural environment; he felt Los Angeles was the purely American city of the Industrial Era. Quite like me, he felt an interest for North American grain elevators, and studied how they influenced development of the skyscraper. Yet, for all of his interest in Los Angeles, there was one interest almost missed: the defining American city of the twentieth century was Chicago. Los Angeles simply built on a very different departure away from the Chicago experience. The Los Angeles urban development model seemed to gain prominence after it had effectively dumped its mass transit system. If the movie weren’t so tongue in cheek, the downfall of the “Big Red Train” was portrayed with almost embarrassing similarities in the 1988 film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit“.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Chicago must have seemed like the epicentre of the industrial universe. Yet, for all of its new found technological advancements, Chicago was a very down to earth, if not predictable place. Chicago’s practicality was borne of ingenuity. It just seemed to convey a Midwestern notion of common sense. These days, we would try to find a fancy new term for this line of thinking, perhaps calling it….. sustainable design, or transit oriented development.
Chicago was built as a walkable city. When that walkable limit was filled, the railways came, building stations just beyond this walkable limit, and created new towns with their own walkable limits. Chicagoans were a highly mobile people, yet energy efficient thanks to walking and mass transit. It wasn’t until the motor car came along that the areas between the town centres became infilled with sprawl.
While Chicago is chock full of bridges that go up and down and turn around, those devices that are rarely seen are as important. After departing from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park studio, Dwight Perkins came to be in charge of the Bureau of Architecture at Chicago Public Schools. His theories about preventing disease through good design were simply revolutionary. Lifting spaces out of pre-Deep Tunnel System basements that were prone to flooding, he went to enormous lengths to promote concepts of light and fresh air. Many of his schools – like Carl Schurz High School – used vast air plenums fed by decorative roof vent intakes to keep a constant supply of fresh air throughout the building. In another building, the Lyman Trumbell School, the washrooms are built around strategically placed light wells, offering light and air to those same interior washrooms that were once relegated to musty cellars. Still other schools of the era after Mr. Perkins’ tenure displayed very early examples of ‘dampers’; a mechanical device that would sense hot or cool air, and direct it appropriately for the time of year. Outside of schools, many early skyscrapers demonstrated the same principles known today as ‘green design’ by providing shallow floor plan depths between exterior walls with window openings, a simple design feature that allowed natural daylight and ventilation. Factories, industrial plants and warehouses mastered a “vertical assembly” concept: raw materials would arrive and immediately be shipped up to the top floor. The product would become more and more assembled on its trek down through the building, the finished product appearing on the ground floor, ready to be shipped back out. Compare this concept to the enormous, single level warehouses that line I-55 through Bolingbrook.
Chicagoans still use one of the best and most accessible public transit systems available in North America. We simply started with something good. Some design choices – like mining out pine forests in our quest to build – may not have been the best practice in hindsight. Other design ingenuity represented a “best practices” in sustainable design technology, still relevant today.
Much has been said about issues concerning development on the periphery of Chicagoland. Sprawl – even the name sounds like a lethargic beast. I’ve oft wondered what sort of commute times we’ve created for folks living in the new tracts. Certainly, sprawl stands to diminish the quality of life by forcing one to spend lengthening times in daily commutes, by lessening the supply of agricultural land, and by investing enormous public funds into new infrastructure projects that serve the far flung reaches.
The notion of increasing density in existing communities often evokes arguments of crowding and increasing crime. Yet, many older communities in the Chicago area historically have been more populous, more dense. When the city of Chicago hit its population zenith in the 1950’s, many would argue that it was more livable then, than in the intervening time until today. While Chicago experienced population growth in recent years, it has yet to recover back to this population level. Some may observe that the inner city has become a more attractive place to live with the increase in population. Not only is it desirable to live closer to work and cultural centres, density hits on a specific social quality that Chicagoans have been known for. We like to schmooze. And one may say that density assists one’s ability to conduct schmoozing.
By increasing density in established communities with well respected ‘urban images’ and reputations, wanton urban renewal would simply destroy the very qualities that are desirable. Infill development, respectful of existing infrastructure, may be designed in such a way to maintain those very qualities that are desirable in an existing community. For a municipality, carefully thought infill may bolster local tax bases to fund services.
Infill development may take different shapes and sizes, and may seek many different settings to accomplish its goal. The former Dearborn Station yards are an excellent example of large scale infill redevelopment of existing land that triggered a renaissance of the Near South Side. In Bucktown, the abandoned “Bloomingdale Line” became a pocket neighbourhood providing housing and commercial activities. One only needs to gaze at the large tracts of vacant land seen from the CTA Green Line to envision future potential.
Yet, these examples are all larger scaled, and sought to bring about change to existing urban context. What about established communities looking for densification strategies? Beyond “downtown densification’ and ‘transportation corridor development’ – both excellent strategies – imagination provides a wealth of solutions done caringly with an existing context so as to not disrupt scale and urban image.
One easy example of small scale, yet effective densification is the potential of the coach house – the ‘granny flat’. When done properly to respect overall site coverage and setbacks from property lines and other buildings to allow sunlight and open space, the notion of an apartment over a garage on a residential alley addresses many issues. The overall site coverage increases minimally, a neighbourhood known for open spaces and gardens can still maintain that image. The notion of people living off of alleys helps to police those spaces by giving a full time human presence. The notion of smaller living units addresses affordability. As for what this may look like, one only needs to conjure images of quaint London-style ‘mews’ of flats located off of the main street on lanes.
London-style ‘mews’ provide a further example of creative densification when applied to other neighbourhoods. Think of the sort of artist studios that could be created along alleys. The idea of a community having its own ‘Gallery Walk’ along its backside has an attraction. Growing from this, some small commercial galleries could blossom along alleys. Home offices could flourish, with addresses based on “Randolph Lane” rather than “Randolph Street”.
I wonder….what if a neighbourhood put very small theatres and cinemas along its alleys, and used this to generate festivals for the locals…
Urban infills offer countless creative solutions to urban problems.
