Fire on Bosworth Avenue: Photo of the Day - May 17, 2013
May. 17, 2013
Q&A with Cheryl Raye Stout
May. 17, 2013
As a veteran female sports reporter, Cheryl Raye Stout has had to prove her chops over the nearly 30 years she’s been reporting in this city. We had a delightful phone conversation about breaking through the glass ceiling (which took the form of the Bears locker room door), her rapport with some of the city's sports legends and her thoughts on head injuries. Go here if you’d like to learn a little bit more about her history as a Chicagoan and reporter. We spoke for much longer than your typical blog post, so if you'd like to see the full chat, go here.You teach radio sportscasting at Columbia College. What do you have to teach students now about reporting that wasn’t relevant 10 years ago?
Chicago bike culture 101
May. 17, 2013
Just in time for summer bike season, Walk Score (the company best known for rating the walkability of neighborhoods across the country) awarded Chicago the number 10 spot on its list of most bikeable American cities. Sure, we lag behind Portland, San Francisco and New York, but we beat Austin! Hipsters unite.
Of course, not all Chicago cyclists are hip young people riding vintage Schwinns or fixie conversions with neon aerospokes. Some are newbies (a.k.a the people who had no idea what I was referring to just now), while others are hard-core athletes accustomed to flying down Lakeshore Drive at maximum velocity.
Derrick Rose's decision gets ugly reaction
May. 17, 2013
There is plenty of time for the Bulls to heal all their various ailments after losing the series to Miami. In the case of Derrick Rose, he has some other wounds that need to be repaired between now and when he returns to play next year.The anger directed at Rose for not returning this season after major ACL knee surgery was frankly, unbelievable. There were definite mistakes made concerning the prospect of the Bulls guard’s return to game time action. His shoe company even did a video "The Return" to highlight the rehabbing Rose was doing after he was given the green light.
At media day in early October, Rose sounded hopeful that he would be able to join the team during the season. At no time, publicly, did Derrick Rose or the Bulls ever give a hard date. It was all speculation that drove the story, lit a smoldering fire and turned into a firestorm once months passed.
The silence of Rose and his camp of handlers muddied the waters. When there were "on the record" quotes, it was Rose’s brother/manager Reggie that caused the biggest stir.
Four corners, four gas stations
May. 17, 2013I grew up near a landmark intersection, though I didn’t realize it at the time.
The year is 1961. Montrose Avenue, meet Austin Avenue. 4400 north, 6000 west.
Four corners. Four gas stations. What better monument to the American car culture of the mid-20th Century?
The Standard station on the northwest corner came first. Then, going clockwise around the intersection, there was Texaco, Mobil, and Pure. I’m not sure in what order these other stations were built.
(There was actually a fifth gas station a few hundred feet east of the intersection. A tiny Sinclair station stood on the southeast corner of Montrose and Mason. Grandpa Price said it had been there since the 1920s. By 1965 it was gone.)
Next to the Mobil station there was a vacant lot where we played baseball. Like most Chicagoans, we called it "the prairie." Other than that, I had no connection to the four gas stations on the four corners, and no stories to tell about them. They were simply part of the neighborhood.
During the 1970s, with gas prices rising, four stations became redundant. The Texaco was the first to go, converted into an auto clinic. The Standard became a bank branch.
Handpicked: Trash fish, mah jongg tea and more
May. 17, 2013
Friday, May 17
Unicornucopia: Big Fork, Co-op Sauce, and Pipeworks Brewing collaboration party at Star Lounge. A Chicago Craft Beer Week four course, four beer pairing dinner. First magical course: Wisconsin morels, Michigan asparagus, crispy Don Pedro's prosciutto, shaved salt cured yolk, and fermented poblano vinaigrette; paired with Pipeworks' Ninja Vs. Unicorn Double IPA. Admission $45.
Saturday, May 18
A look back at the Harold Washington Library competition
May. 17, 2013For several months in 1988, the competition to design the Harold Washington Library was the talk of the city.
The new downtown library not just a place for books, but an architectural gut check: Would America's first city of architecture pick a daring design? Or would Chicago—in the wake of the cost overruns at the then-new State of Illinois Building and the McCormick Place west addition (or out of sheer timidity)— select the safe and familiar?
In 1989, PBS' Nova series took a look at the competition in an episode called "Design Wars," seen in an edited version in the video above. The program explored the five teams each headed by architects Dirk Lohan, Thomas Beeby, SOM, Helmut Jahn and Arthur Erickson of Canada that sought the commission. Each architect was paired with a real estate developer to assure the design could be built for $140 million price tag.
Each submittal was profoundly different. Beeby's design won, of course, and the building was completed in 1991.
Watching "Design Wars" a quarter century later, there is much to note. The camera pan at the beginning of the video reveals a skyline east of Michigan Avenue that looks remarkably barren now. At 0:16, architecture historian Bob Bruegmann in a stroll along the riverwalk that once ran next to the old Chicago Sun-Times Building at 401 N. Wabash Ave. nicely explains why architecture is so important here.
Calumet brain trust tackles environmental issues across states
May. 16, 2013
Although county lines parcel out the southern shore of Lake Michigan like garden plots, the environmental issues that unify people from Michigan City, Ind. to Chicago do not respect political boundaries.
Nor do most economic issues. Industrial decay and depopulation have left communities throughout the greater Calumet region with some common problems, as well as shared opportunities.
That was the message from the inaugural Calumet Summit, a conference convened this week in Gary, Indiana’s lakefront Marquette Park by the Calumet Stewardship Initiative.
The summit follows some major moves in the Calumet area, not least of which is the Millennium Reserve initiative, dubbed the nation's largest "open space" project.