Category: Chicago-esque

Chicago related, duh

Suicide Ramp Reconstruction to Begin

Seth Anderson0 comment

Jon Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune passes on the news that the long-delayed project of reconfiguring the entrance ramps1 to the Kennedy Expressway is finally going ahead, with some changes.

Washington Suicide Ramp

Downtown Chicago must often throw the dice — and perhaps mumble a quick prayer or profanity — while attempting to merge, squeeze, plead or fight their way into highway traffic.

Hundreds of collisions result each year at the “suicide merges” along the Kennedy, the second-busiest expressway in the Chicago region. (The Dan Ryan Expressway ranks No. 1.)

After postponing safety improvements for years on the 1960s-era highway design, the state is now targeting federal stimulus grants for the $9.3 million project to try to straighten out the mess.

Work is set to begin Monday toward rebuilding six notoriously dangerous center-access entrance ramps to the Kennedy. And that inevitably will cause a whole different kind of mess: a months-long traffic nightmare at a crucial choke point for Chicago’s highway system.

[Click to continue reading: Kennedy Expressway left-lane ‘suicide’ ramps makeover begins Monday — chicagotribune.com]

Kennedy Suicide Ramp

Any improvement is good, but I would prefer the original plan had been viable, namely, moving the ramps to the right of the road. You know, like 95% of all on-ramps.

The first phase of work, aimed at improving traffic flow and reducing crashes on the Kennedy ( Interstate Highway 90/94) near the Hubbard’s Cave tunnel, focuses on realigning three exit ramps. The change is intended to allow for more gradual maneuvering off the expressway and to discourage drivers from aggressively weaving across lanes and causing rear-end or side-swipe collisions, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation.

“Hubbard’s Cave is an area where we see fender-benders every day,” said IDOT spokeswoman Marisa Kollias.

After the exit ramps are overhauled, crews will start rebuilding the entrance ramps in September to improve the lines of sight and lengthen the acceleration lanes, IDOT officials said.

When the construction dust settles in November, reconfigured and more motorist-friendly entrance ramps to the Kennedy will open eastbound at Lake, Randolph and Madison Streets; and westbound at Madison and Adams Street and Jackson Boulevard, IDOT officials said.

The earthen remnants of the Kennedy entrance ramps at Washington Boulevard and Monroe Street, which were closed in 2005 and 2006, respectively, will be removed to make way for longer, gentler ramp entrances at Randolph, Madison and Adams, officials said.

Footnotes:
  1. often called the suicide ramps – I tend to avoid them altogether, leaving my house a few minutes earlier and taking another ramp [↩]

Chicago Children’s Museum move stalls out

Seth Anderson2 Comments

About a year ago, we had a flurry of posts opposing the move1 /2 /3 /4 /5 /6 /7 of the Chicago Children’s Museum from Navy Pier to a semi-subterranean location in a corner of Grant Park.

Daley Bicentennial Plaza

Just a year after winning hard-fought City Council permission to move to Grant Park, the Chicago Children’s Museum has hit a financial wall, raising a real prospect that its highly controversial new facility in the park’s northeast corner may never be built.

A moribund economy now may have a better chance of blocking the project than lawsuits by parks activists and neighborhood opponents. Fundraising has foundered while projected costs have climbed by tens of millions to $150 million or more, Crain’s has learned. Sources close to the project say odds now are 50-50 at best that the Grant Park plan will proceed.

As a result, the museum is considering its options, including downsizing the proposed facility, getting a cash infusion from the Chicago Park District or extending the lease on its current space at Navy Pier as far as 2025.

…

Museum board Chairman Gigi Pritzker, who was not available for comment, could tap her personal fortune to bail out the project, were she so inclined. But short of that, signs are multiplying that the proposed facility is turning into one more headache for Mayor Richard M. Daley, who spent considerable political capital pushing the museum plan through the council in June 2008 over the opposition of the local alderman, Brendan Reilly (42nd).

According to the museum’s latest available income-tax return, filed in May with Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s charitable trust division, the museum had $28.1 million in “pledges receivable” as of June 30, 2008 — just $1 million more than it did a year earlier. Much of that is believed to be a continuing naming-rights commitment for the proposed facility from Northbrook-based Allstate Corp., which says it still backs the project.

[Click to read more details of Museum move stalls out | Crain’s Chicago Business]

Of course, wealthy heiress Gigi Pritzker could fund the construction out of her own vast wealth should she choose to, since she was one of the driving forces behind the whole fiasco, but the whole point was to get taxpayers to pay for the museum’s new location. Kind of like one of those sports stadium deals we fulminate against now and then. The Chicago Children’s Museum is a private museum, thus any profits collected will remain in the museum, and not the City of Chicago.

Footnotes:
  1. for instance: Setback for the CCM juggernaut [↩]
  2. or: Fight for Chicago’s treasured lakefront [↩]
  3. or: Subterranean museum [↩]
  4. or: The Grant Park land-grab [↩]
  5. or: Chicago astroturf alert [↩]
  6. or: Keep childrens museum out of Grant Park [↩]
  7. or: Daley vs Reilly [↩]

No ketchup on a properly made hot dog

Seth Anderson0 comment

the Wieners Family Crest

Hot dogs, and their consumption, is nearly a religion in Chicago.1 Dogma proclaims that a hot dog has certain condiments, and ketchup is not one of the allowed sacraments. Cecil Adams offers one explanation:

Ketchup smothers the flavor of the hot dog because ketchup makers add sugar to their products. That takes the edge off the highly acidic tomatoes, but it takes the edge off everything else, too. Which is exactly why a lot of parents like it, according to Mel Plotsky, sales manager for the David Berg hot dog company in Chicago. (Chicago is one of the hot dog’s holy cities.) Put ketchup on it and a kid will swallow anything–and from there it’s a straight shot to Velveeta cheese, Franco-American spaghetti, and Deborah Norville.

For that matter, you want to watch the mustard, too. Plotsky says your mainstream brands like French’s put in too much turmeric and whatnot. What you want is some unpretentious mustard like Plochman’s that enhances rather than competes with the flavor of the beef. You should also steam or grill rather than boil your hot dogs–water leaches away the flavor and softens the wiener till it becomes non-tooth-resistant mush.

But–getting back to the original question–you say you like the taste of tomatoes. Fine, then eat tomatoes, as God meant them to be eaten–fresh sliced and piled on top of the hot dog. The recommended ingredients of a hot dog with everything, in order of application, are mustard, relish, chopped onion, sliced tomato, kosher pickle spear, optional peppers, and celery salt.

[From The Straight Dope: Why is there no ketchup on a properly made hot dog? ]

If I grill my own hot dogs, and have time to create it exactly as I wish to eat it, I add mustard, chopped onion, giardiniera peppers, and serve the grilled hot dog on a lightly toasted whole wheat bun. If I eat a hot dog somewhere in the city, I may have the extra “Chicago-esque” ingredients like celery salt, sliced tomato and kosher pickle in addition to my other favorite ingredients.

Chicago Dog
[A Chicago style char dog from Wiener’s Circle on Clark Street]

Never ketchup. I actively avoid ketchup on any food item. If for some reason I am eating french fries, and I can’t have vinegar, I’ll use mustard as a dipping condiment.

Give the Gift of Chicago
[Give the Gift of Chicago – the side of a Vienna Beef truck]

Footnotes:
  1. slightly more adherents than simply a cult, but not quite enough attention with atheists to qualify as a real religion [↩]

A Quiet Hero of Civil Rights History, Vanished in 1939

Seth Anderson1 Comment

In 1938, the Supreme Court, in a 6-2 decision1, ruled that the segregated University of Missouri Law School had to admit Lloyd Lionel Gaines, but he never made it there.

Lloyd Gaines was moody that winter of 1939, acting not at all like a man who had just triumphed in one of the biggest Supreme Court cases in decades. And oddly, even though it was raining and the sidewalks of Chicago were clogged with slush, he felt a need to buy postage stamps one night.

Or so he told a friend just before he left his apartment house on March 19, 1939, never to be seen again. Had he not vanished at 28, Lloyd Gaines might be in the pantheon of civil rights history with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall and other giants whose names will be invoked at the centennial convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which started this weekend in Manhattan.

Instead, Mr. Gaines has been consigned to one of history’s side rooms, his name recalled mainly by legal scholars and relatives, like Tracy Berry, an assistant United States attorney in St. Louis whose grandmother was Mr. Gaines’s sister.

“He was taken away and more than likely killed,” Ms. Berry said when asked to speculate on his fate. She said Mr. Gaines was known in family lore as “a caring, loving brother and son” who would not have chosen to disappear or commit suicide, despite the pressure he was under.

[Click to read more of A Quiet Hero of Civil Rights History, Vanished in 1939 – NYTimes.com]

I’m nearly done reading American Pharaoh, and so much of the book is about race relations in Chicago. I am amazed how virulent the hatred towards blacks was, even as late as the 1970s. Not that there isn’t still racism in Chicago2, but I can’t imagine bigots throwing rocks and burning bottles at police for daring to attempt to protect black families from harm. I’m unsure as to the exact circumstances that led to Mr. Gaines’ death (was it abduction by bigots, or something else?), but the racism was so ingrained in Chicago of the last century, I am not surprised if he was actually murdered.

—

update, post-racial, like in swimming pools in Huntingdon Valley, PA, as illustrated by Tony Auth.

Footnotes:
  1. there was a vacancy on the court at the time [↩]
  2. and the US, and the world [↩]

Court challenge could jeopardize Chicago’s landmark ordinance

Seth Anderson0 comment

Blood in Our Eyes
[Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store, now vacant]

Blue was the color of my true loves hair
[Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina Towers]

Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) … urged protected status last year for the iconic riverfront complex designed by architect Bertrand Goldberg. “When you look at any snow globe they sell at O’Hare or Midway, there’s Mr. Goldberg’s beautiful towers,” Reilly said.

Yet the effort to safeguard this mid-1960s classic is grinding forward rather than speeding ahead. That is a consequence, some preservation advocates contend, of a court challenge that could jeopardize Chicago’s 41-year-old landmark ordinance — and the 281 individual landmarks and 51 districts it safeguards, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall, Louis Sullivan’s former Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store on State Street, and Wrigley Field.

In January, the Illinois Appellate Court deemed the law to be unconstitutionally vague. When the Illinois Supreme Court denied the city’s appeal of that ruling last Thursday, it sent the case back to the Cook County Circuit Court, where a judge is thought to have little choice but to strike down the law.

[Click to continue reading Blair Kamin’s Landmark ordinance: Court challenge could jeopardize Chicago’s 41-year-old landmark ordinance and affect U.S. preservation efforts — chicagotribune.com]

Rookery

[stairway of The Rookery, Lobby designed by Frank Lloyd Wright]

Personally, landmarks are what makes a city interesting, what gives a city an identity, what makes a city great (or by contrast, generic). Haphazardly demolishing and “reconfiguring” landmarks to make sterile condo buildings and office parks is a travesty. I sincerely hope, after what will probably be years of litigation, the City of Chicago and other metropolitan authorities come to their senses and write a stronger landmark preservation bill, protecting our shared architectural heritage.

Jonathan Fine, executive director of Preservation Chicago, an advocacy group, argues that Chicago’s landmark law is inherently political and that it represents a fine-grained application of zoning power, which allows the city to decide what uses go on what properties — and how dense those uses can be.

“It’s a land-use planning tool,” Fine said of the landmarks law. “It’s not a wrench. It’s a needle-nosed plier. It fits in there with every tool that this city has to guide and direct responsible planning.”

Harry Weese Cottages

[Harry Weese Cottages]

Tesla Dealership on Grand west of Morgan

Seth Anderson2 Comments

I’d test drive a Tesla: sounds like a fun car. However, way (way way) beyond my budget: $120,000 is steep for any item, much less an automobile.

Arlbor

[closest photo of mine I could find-this is 800 W Grand Ave, or nearby.]

Car companies have tinkered with all-electric cars for years — but have run into problems, particularly high price and limited range. The 2006 documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” told of the 1990s Saturn EV1 electric car — which General Motors recalled and destroyed.

The California-based Tesla claims to sell the only highway- capable all-electric car in North America or Europe, but it won’t be alone for long. Americans will be seeing more alternative-engine cars — all-electric, plug-in electric hybrid (like the planned Chevy Volt), conventional hybrid, and hydrogen-fuel cell — as car makers compete to offer more fuel-efficient models. Revving up the contest is last-week’s federal mandate that all new cars and trucks average 35.5 mpg by 2016.

Wisniewski’s Tesla isn’t exactly middle-market — it’s a two-seat sports car that cost him $120,000. The California company is working on a family sedan, which it hopes to start producing in late 2011, at a base cost of $49,900 after government rebate.

Tesla expects to open its first Chicago dealership next month at 1053 W. Grand.

“It’s definitely a conversation piece,” said Kevin Daly, Tesla’s Midwest regional sales manager, of his own Roadster. “It really has changed the script on what people’s thoughts are for electric cars.”

The car charges overnight, like a cell phone, using either a 110-volt or 220-volt charger. It claims to run 220 miles on a charge. Daly says the car runs well in extreme cold or heat (though he admits a sports car isn’t great in heavy snow).

The cost for the electricity is about 1 or 2 cents per mile. To get ready for guests with electric cars, Hyatt Hotels and Lake Point Tower in Chicago are offering charging stations, according to Daly.

[From Testing out the Tesla :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Transportation]


View Larger Map

Live to Ride
[Ogden and Grand – slightly west of 1053 Grand.]

Aleksandar Hemon On Chicago Places That Inspired Love and Obstacles

Seth Anderson0 comment

Note: I lived in Ukrainian Village from 1994-19961, and Rainbo Room was one of my hang-outs as well.


“Love and Obstacles” (Aleksandar Hemon)

Nelson Algren Avenue

Aleksandar Hemon was visiting a friend in the Ukrainian Village section of Chicago in 1992 when war broke out in his hometown of Sarajevo. He extended his visit, eventually settling into an apartment nearby. “The area was completely devoid of glamour, and that suited me at the time,” the 45-year-old author says. “There was a war going on at home and my life was as far from glamorous as can be.” It was in Chicago that Mr. Hemon learned how to write in English, and he still lives there (in the Edgewater area). His 2008 novel “The Lazarus Project” was nominated for a National Book Award. His new collection of short stories “Love and Obstacles” centers on an unnamed narrator who moved from Sarajevo to Chicago in 1992. Mr. Hemon annotated a map of key places in his adopted city that influenced or inspired his fiction.

…

4. Rainbo Club at Damen and Division

In “Szmura’s Room,” Szmura and Bogdan go for a drink to this cult bar, which is perpetually going in and out of hipness. In the early ’90s it was one of those cool semidumps, before the neighborhood was despoiled by sushi bars and boutiques where falsely damaged clothes are sold, before studied negligence became fashionable. Nelson Algren used to drink there and brought along Simone de Beauvoir with whom he was having a famous affair. The locals fondly remembered her as Simon the Beaver.

[Click to continue reading Aleksandar Hemon On Places That Inspired ‘Love and Obstacles’ – WSJ.com]

[Non-WSJ subscribers use this link]

Rainbo Club

The book looks like a worthy addition to one’s library:

Aleksandar Hemon earned his reputation— and his MacArthur “genius grant”—for his short stories, and he returns to the form with a powerful collection of linked stories that stands with The Lazarus Project as the best work of his celebrated career. A few of the stories have never been published before; the others have appeared in The New Yorker, and several of those have also been included in The Best American Short Stories. All are infused with the dazzling, astonishingly creative prose and the remarkable, haunting autobiographical elements that have distinguished Hemon as one of the most original and illustrious voices of our time.

What links the stories in Love and Obstacles is the narrator, a young man who—like Hemon himself—was raised in Yugoslavia and immigrated to the United States. The stories of Love and Obstacles are about that coming of age and the complications—the obstacles—of growing up in a Communist but cosmopolitan country, and the disintegration of that country and the consequent uprooting and move to America in young adulthood. But because it’s Aleksandar Hemon, the stories extend far beyond the immigrant experience; each one is punctuated with unexpected humor and spins out in fabulist, exhilarating directions, ultimately building to an insightful, often heartbreaking conclusion. Woven together, these stories comprise a book that is, genuinely, as cohesive and powerful as any fiction— achingly human, charming, and inviting.

Footnotes:
  1. give or take [↩]

Streetwise Magazine May Be Forced To Shutter

Seth Anderson0 comment

A shame StreetWise can’t get a bailout from the federal government: they actually help people. StreetWise sells each issue to the vendors for $0.75, the vendors resell for $2.001, and keep the change.

Streetwise Headquarters

StreetWise, the weekly Chicago magazine for the homeless, has fallen victim to a hobbled economy and could be forced to close its doors by June if it cannot replace hemorrhaging foundation support, its managers say.

A shutdown would end 16 years of publication and put at risk a non-profit publication that employed homeless Chicagoans as writers and vendors.
“We’ve been in trouble for a long time, but now we’re feeling like we can’t dig ourselves out so easily,” said StreetWise executive director Bruce Crane.

Trying to stem the tide, the publication has switched from a weekly newspaper to a magazine, changed the makeup of its board and slashed staffing, services to the homeless and costs. The organization has sought to replace lost income with stepped up fundraising and grant-writing, and expanded its efforts to seek out advertisers.

Nevertheless, the savings and new funding sources are not enough to cover the loss of major foundation support that has kept the publication afloat in the past.

“If we get no grants, no economic stimulus funds, if nothing else would happen, we’d be 45 days from going out of business,” said StreetWise board vice chairman Pete Kadens.

[Click to continue reading Magazine sold by homeless may fold – Chicago Breaking News]

There are some dudes who have become veritable icons on the streets of Chicago, hawking StreetWise from the same corner for years.

Ironically, on the same day, Janie Lorber of the New York Times reports that circulation is up, at least in other cities (StreetWise is not mentioned).

Newspapers produced and sold by homeless people in dozens of American cities are flourishing even as the deepening recession endangers conventional newspapers. At many of them, circulation is growing, along with the sales forces dispatched to sell the papers to passers-by.

The recession has hardly been a windfall for these street papers, most of which are nonprofits that survive on grants and donations as well as circulation revenue. But the economic downturn has heightened interest in their offbeat coverage and driven new vendors to their doors.[Click to continue reading Rising Circulation, at Papers Sold by Homeless – NYTimes.com]

Doh!

Footnotes:
  1. or whatever they can get, a percentage of issues sell for more than $2.00 [↩]

Actors’ Equity Association’s new home

Seth Anderson0 comment

557 W Randolph St, formerly the headquarters of Zonta International, will be the new home of the 48,000 member Actor’s Equity Association.

New Actors' Equity Association headquarters at 557 W Randolph St

Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States, has purchased its own building on Randolph Street just a block or two west of the core of Chicago’s theater district. And according to Steven DiPaola, the union’s assistant executive director for finance and administration, Equity is considering moving some of the union’s national back-office functions from New York to Chicago.

[From Actors’ Equity buys a building in Chicago, will expand presence here | The Theater Loop – News from America’s hottest theater city]

According to Chris Jones, the building at 557 W. Randolph was built in 1855, and is one of the few that survived the 1871 Chicago fire. I wonder if there will events held there? Celebrity sightings?

Daley and his Parking Meter Scandal

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Doubt if this particular Mayor Daley scandal has percolated into the national news media yet, but it is only a matter of time.

No one in Chicago has been happy about the recent hike in parking meter rates, but by last week the frustration had become outrage, and the outrage had become a political problem. Since the city’s speedy decision in December to lease the meters for 75 years in return for about $1.2 billion in quick cash, what you get for your quarter has declined precipitously. Worse, residents are fed up with the tickets they’re receiving thanks to broken meters and outdated labeling. Some are boycotting meters by parking on side streets or not driving at all; others have tagged or vandalized them.

Finally, on March 31, city officials called a press conference to confront the problem—or at least to offer up someone who could take the blame so the Daley administration didn’t have to. They presented one Dennis Pedrelli, chief executive officer of Chicago Parking Meters, the private entity that’s now responsible for operating the meters. Pedrelli delivered a mea culpa. “We regret any issues that occurred,” he said. “We are working as quickly as possible to address those issues.” He promised that the company wouldn’t raise rates or write any more tickets until it had fixed the broken meters and posted accurate information.

But the event didn’t touch on what’s really behind the parking meter problems: the deal that put the city’s 36,000 meters in the hands of Pedrelli’s company. Once city officials decided to privatize the meters, they rushed into a deal with little regard for the financial risks or potential impact on the public, turning control of a revenue-generating city asset over to a company that had just qualified for federal bailout funds.

[Click to continue reading Chicago Reader | FAIL: The Story of Chicago’s Parking Meter Lease Deal – How Mayor Daley and his crew hid their process from the public, ignored their own rules, railroaded the City Council, and screwed the taxpayers | By Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke]

Citizens get angry over the kind of corruption that directly effects them every time they drive in the city; Daley better watch out if he wants to remain Mayor-For-Life. I’m voting against him in the next election, should he decide to run again.

Fixing Another Parking Meter

Not sure if this Department of Revenue employee was repairing a vandalized parking meter, or just a damaged one, but I suspect vandalization as he repaired several on this block or W. Randolph.

–update 4/10/09

Ramsin Canon of Gapers Block has an excellent article expanding on the topic

Progressives, do you think your constituencies will forgive you for your silence, cooperation, and collaboration? Do you think your legitimacy will survive what is now growing into more than a decade of utter silence? Do you think making demands on behalf of some corner or slice of the city will make up for refusing to take on the system that forces you to beg in the first place? It won’t. Your irrelevancy grows with each day you refuse to dissent in any meaningful way. Spending money to replace one group of aldermen, state legislators, or whoever, with another group that have to work with the same rotten system is not an effort at real change; it is political posturing meant to extract more concessions from a system left untouched.

The excuse we always hear (off the record of course) from Aldermen, community groups, think tanks, and the rest, is that taking on the Mayor is just too darn scary. He’s too powerful. But what makes him powerful, like all bullies, is the constant refusal of anybody to stand up to him. And of course, it isn’t fear: its convenience. That whole “…but he’s our sonofabitch” mentality. We saw how well that worked with Augusto Pinochet and Saddam Hussein.

[Click to continue reading Gapers Block : Mechanics : Chicago Politics – The Erosion of Daley and the Coward Defense]

Daley had better watch out, the public rage at his administration is palpable, and growing.

Bob on Obama

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (Barack Obama)

Bob liked Barack Obama’s book enough to support him in 2008.

Bill Flanagan: In that song Chicago After Dark were you thinking about the new President?

Bob Dylan: Not really. It’s more about State Street and the wind off Lake Michigan and how sometimes we know people and we are no longer what we used to be to them. I was trying to go with some old time feeling that I had.

BF: You liked Barack Obama early on. Why was that?

BD: I’d read his book and it intrigued me.

BF: Audacity of Hope?

BD: No it was called Dreams of My Father.

BF: What struck you about him?

BD: Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage – cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

BF: In what way?

BD: First of all, Barack is born in Hawaii. Most of us think of Hawaii as paradise – so I guess you could say that he was born in paradise.

BF: And he was thrown out of the garden.

BD: Not exactly. His mom married some other guy named Lolo and then took Barack to Indonesia to live. Barack went to both a Muslim school and a Catholic school. His mom used to get up at 4:00 in the morning and teach him book lessons three hours before he even went to school. And then she would go to work. That tells you the type of woman she was. That’s just in the beginning of the story.

BF: What else did you find compelling about him?

BD: Well, mainly his take on things. His writing style hits you on more than one level. It makes you feel and think at the same time and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He’s looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people and he’s wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors.

[Click to continue reading Bob Dylan on Barack Obama, Ulysses Grant and American Civil War ghosts ]

One of these days I’ll read the President’s books.

Chicago and Carbon Credits

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Michael Hawthorne catches Da Mare with his green exposed; despite Daley’s incessant marketing Chicago as an environmental innovator, the city still has a long, long way to go.

Green Exchange

Mayor Richard Daley promised long ago that his administration would start fighting global warming by buying 20 percent of its electricity from wind farms and other sources of green energy.

But more than two years after the deadline he set, the city continues to get nearly all of its power from coal, natural gas and nuclear plant

…

As a result, taxpayers paid the full bill for the city’s normal electricity usage, then the city paid again—more than half a million dollars in all—for credits with questionable environmental benefits. Buying carbon credits fights global warming only if they help finance new sources of renewable energy, such as new wind turbines, energy experts said. Yet 87 percent of the credits Chicago has purchased sent money to a wood-burning power plant that has been operating for nearly two decades.

“This is very misleading to the public,” said Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has sharply criticized the carbon offset market. “A city with the clout of Chicago should be able to do this right.”

[click to continue reading Chicago’s ‘green’ promise fades — chicagotribune.com]

Solar Panels - Chicago Center for Green Technology

Is pretending to be green worse than not even trying?

The Black Hebrews

swanksalot0 comment

Fascinating article about the Black Hebrews who left Chicago (and the US) to settle in Israel, often under duress. The African Hebrew Hebrew Israelites persevered and flourished in the desert village of Dimona1 long enough to become assimilated, and even nearly accepted by the Israeli citizens.

Elyahkeem Ben Yehuda could have become another statistic, growing up poor, black and fatherless on the west side of Chicago during the 1950s.

But he never had a run-in with the law, nor did he see the inside of a jail cell, until he moved to Israel to join the African Hebrew Israelite community. “I had to come to Israel to get my first experience in jail,” he said. “But in those days, that was like a badge of honor, to be arrested for God and His people.”

Last month, the 62-year-old Ben Yehuda — father of 10 children and husband of 3 women — became the first member of his community to gain full Israeli citizenship. Looking back on the hurdles he overcame since his 1971 arrival, Ben Yehuda mused, “I can only describe this journey in relationship to my forefathers,” referring to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. “They were able to endure. As long as we put fulfilling the will of the God of Israel first, there’s no challenge that we can’t overcome.”

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem — or Black Hebrews, as they are more commonly known (though not all members are black) — have sparred with the Israeli government for decades over their right to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. It is a right they still do not have. But presaging Ben Yehuda’s achievement last month, Israel granted the community permanent residency status in 2003, offering its 3,000 members a five-year path to apply for citizenship on an individual basis. It’s a process that many others are now undertaking.

[Click to continue reading Once Reviled, Black Hebrews Now Fêted – Forward.com]

via Michael Hawthorne‘s Friday afternoon twitter feed

DNA Bricks

The African Hebrew Israelites web page offers a bit of their history:

In 1966 our spiritual leader, Ben Ammi, had a vision that it was time for the Children of Israel who remained in America (the land of their captivity) to return to the Holy Land (the land of their origin).

In 1967, after almost two thousand years in the Diaspora, four hundred Hebrew Israelites were inspired by the spirit of God to make an exodus from America. According to plan, they settled in Liberia’s interior to purge themselves of the negative attributes they had acquired in the captivity. After spending a two-and-one-half year period in Liberia, The African Hebrew Israelites were prepared to make the last portion of their journey home, returning to Israel in 1969.

In today’s world, man has created so many diversions from and substitutions for the true worship of God that the people have lost their way. We realized just how far we had been led away from God and were astounded by the drastic changes required for those of us who desired to fulfill our responsibility to God as Hebrew Israelites. Nonetheless, we have committed ourselves to the high degree of courage and discipline required to establish an alternative lifestyle that is in harmony with the cycles of God.

[Click to read more of Our Philosophy]

I don’t know if the Black Hebrews have done any deep DNA study, but they explain their origins thusly:

Prior to the excavation of the Suez Canal (1859-69) the entire Arabian Peninsula and what has become known today as the ”Middle East” were physically connected with the African continent. African people lived and moved freely throughout this region of the world.

After the invasion of the Romans in 70 C.E., remnants of the Hebrew Israelites were driven from Jerusalem. For more than 1,000 years many of them migrated across the continent, eventually reaching West Africa.


“Soul Messages from Dimona” (Various Artists)

Update2 via Kumar303’s twitter feed, the African Hebrew Israelites have put out an album called, Soul Messages From Dimona:

Following a path blazed in Belize and the Bahamas, The Numero Group finds yet another stop on the soul diaspora tour: Dimona, Israel. Between 1975-1981, a group of American ex-pats took their native sounds of Detroit and Chicago and intermingled them with the messages of the Black Hebrew culture. The results are a heavenly mix of spiritual soul and jazz with an undercurrent of gospel psychedelia. Featuring the Soul Messengers, the Spirit Of Israel, Sons Of The Kingdom, and the Tonistics, Soul Messages From Dimona is the only living document of a thriving community at both the center and fringe of the world.

Deluxe CD and 2LP set comes stuffed with rare photographs, sleeves, and expansive liner notes about the African Hebrew

sounds fun.

Footnotes:
  1. דִּימוֹנָה [↩]
  2. gotta love Twitter [↩]

Death of the Chicago Tribune

Seth Anderson0 comment

Seems like an almost done deal. The Chicago Tribune has chosen to become a shallow, tabloid newspaper, chasing 20-somethings with a short attention span.

Pippen Peruses the Newspaper
[Pippen already prefers the WSJ]

I got in touch with Coleen Davison. “We’d been [Tribune] subscribers for 12 or 13 years,” she told me. “Obviously we’ve seen changes we weren’t thrilled by, but the last redesign was the final straw. It was sound-bite journalism — all pictures, no stories.”

…

They gave the new Tribune a week and then decided to cancel the subscription to their Naperville home. At the suggestion of the woman in circulation she spoke to about that, Coleen participated in a readers’ phone survey. “As I recall,” she told me, “almost all of the questions were extremely vague and general. The respondee was asked to answer on a scale of 1 to 5 whether they agreed or disagreed. The only question that came remotely close to allowing me to voice my displeasure was something like ‘I think the redesign contains too many pictures.’ I was frustrated that the survey seemed designed to only allow for positive feedback.”

So she wrote a redesign feedback link she found at the Tribune Web site and complained. She told the paper that although its survey hadn’t let her say so, she was “also appalled by the significant drop in the quality of what little news is reported. Rearranging and renaming the sections I can deal with, but the new Tribune looks and reads like a tabloid magazine.”

She went on, “I understand the need to update your look periodically, and I also understand the desire to attract more readers. It’s just terribly sad that the way you chose to do this was to pander to those who prefer tabloid journalism to real news.” Her long note, which I’m merely excerpting here, she signed “Sadly and sincerely.”

She heard back from John McCormick of the Tribune editorial board

[Click to read more Chicago Reader Blogs: News Bites]

Daily News

I’ve been a Tribune subscriber since 1994, and I’ve just about decided to cancel my subscription as well. There just isn’t much news in the Tribune these days, and so why bother getting it delivered? I already subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and the weekend New York Times, perhaps I’ll just expand my NYT subscription. The Trib is a pale shadow of the paper it used to be, and Sam Zell obviously doesn’t give a shit about readers like me.

48-Story Building proposed for the West Loop

Seth Anderson0 comment

Oh joy, another skyscraper to impede our view.

Crowne Plaza at Night
[Crowne Plaza building at night]

A developer has announced plans to build the tallest building west of the Dan Ryan Expressway, a $150 million, 48-story apartment-hotel tower at West Madison and North Halsted streets. The announcement met mixed responses at an initial West Loop community meeting Tuesday night.

The development includes 48 floors of apartments atop a base with ground-level retail, six stories of parking and a ballroom that bridges to the nearby Crowne Plaza Hotel at 733 W. Madison St. David Friedman, the developer and hotel owner, has a target completion date of 2011 for the project.

Friedman, whose company FF Realty Inc. owns four luxury apartment buildings and five hotels – including the West Loop’s Crowne Plaza – will continue to hold meetings to gauge community reaction before applying for a new zoning designation that would allow the 500-foot structure. The proposed location, the Crowne Plaza parking lot, is currently zoned for buildings up to 300 feet in height.

[Click to continue reading 48-story West Loop tower pitched]

Greektown, as this part of the West Loop is often called, already suffers from traffic congestion; we shall see if the public parking proposed for this building will help.

The elliptical-shaped glass building would serve as an apartment-hotel, with amenities like room service and maid service, but unlike, for example, the Trump Tower building – a downtown condo-hotel complex completed this year – its 514 residential units, a mixture of studios and one and two bedrooms, will be leased. Typically, only half of luxury renters require parking, so some of the six-story lot’s 553 spaces would be public parking, a growing necessity in the West Loop, where expensive hourly fees in garages and meters are draining drivers’ wallets.