Category: Neighborhoods

Bringing a bit of Copenhagen to Chicago: two north side aldermen discuss their recent trip to the cycling mecca

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48th Ward Alderman Harry Osterman, CDOT Deputy Commissioner Scott Kubly, 47th Ward Alderman Ameya Pawar, and Active Transportation Alliance staff member Lee Crandell stand in front of a crowd of over 60 local residents to discuss a recent aldermanic trip to Copenhagen.

Earlier this year, three Chicago alderman along with two staff members from the Department of Transportation traveled to Copenhagen to learn about the city’s cycling infrastructure. Last Thursday, two of the alderman who took part in that trip – Ameya Pawar of the 47th Ward and Harry Osterman of the 48th Ward – held an event at the Swedish American Museum in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood to discuss their experience. They were joined by CDOT Deputy Commissioner Scott Kubly, one of two CDOT staff members whom accompanied the aldermen to Copenhagen. The other was Bicycle Program Coordinator Ben Gomberg.

Scott Kubly began the presentation by discussing the history of Copenhagen’s cycling movement and describing some of the infrastructure elements that have allowed cycling to become so successful in the city. Kubly said that his biggest takeaway from the trip was that the city wasn’t always a bike utopia.

“If you go back as recently as the 1970s, it was very much a car-culture,” Kubly said. “They were building freeways. There was a time when all of this fantastic public space that we saw was dominated by parked cars. They’ve spent the last 30 to 40 years incrementally improving their infrastructure.” Continue reading Bringing a bit of Copenhagen to Chicago: two north side aldermen discuss their recent trip to the cycling mecca

Ride into the safety zone: new traffic calming and ped safety treatments

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Englewood resident Denise King tries out the new refuge island at 63rd and Claremont.

[This piece also appeared in Checkerboard City, John’s weekly transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets in print on Thursdays.]

Running late as usual, I hop on my bicycle and sprint south from Logan Square, fortunately with a sweet tailwind at my back. I’m heading to the ribbon cutting for new Children’s Safety Zone traffic-calming and pedestrian-safety treatments at Claremont Academy Elementary School, 2300 West 64th Street in West Englewood.

The city has 1,500 of these safety zones, designated areas within one-eighth mile of schools and parks. The Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) is planning to install additional infrastructure at dangerous intersections within these sectors to discourage speeding and make crossing easier. Currently there are about 3,000 pedestrian crashes a year in the city, with about 800 involving kids (full data below). And in this era of rising obesity rates, the goal is also to encourage more children to walk to school and to play at their local park.

Continue reading Ride into the safety zone: new traffic calming and ped safety treatments

CTA reveals designs for new Wilson Red Line station which show new entrance on Sunnyside

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In this drawing of the original and current station house at the corner of Wilson Avenue and Broadway, it appears the station’s architectural heritage is preserved and even restored (see what it used to look like).

The Chicago Transit Authority sent out a press release this morning with five renderings of their proposed design for a reconstructed Red Line station at Wilson Avenue in Uptown. The station was voted “crustiest” by Red Line readers three years in a row (it lost this year to the Sheridan Red Line station).

The project is estimated to cost $203 million; construction will begin in the second quarter of 2013. The station will become a transfer point between Red and Purple lines; the nearest points to do this currently are Belmont (three stops south) and Howard (ten stops north). It will also be an accessible station, helping close the gap on the far north side until the Red and Purple Modernization Project receives funding. The nearest accessible stations currently are Addison (two stops south) and Granville (six stops north).

A new entrance will be built conveniently on Sunnyside Avenue for near-direct access to the Wilson Yard Target and Aldi stores. A rendering of that area was not included in the press release.

The CTA is holding an open house in one week, on Thursday, October 11, from 6-8 PM, at Truman College, 1145 W Wilson Avenue. This may be a good time to talk to the CTA about using the station as a model of future energy uses.

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This rendering shows glass canopies of a design that were later nixed from the Brown Line Rehabilitation project.

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The station name over Wilson Avenue is reminiscent of the Morgan Street Green/Pink Line station.

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A glass enclosed station house on Wilson Avenue. The rendering makes the tracks appear over 20 feet high. The Belmont Station tracks are only about 13 feet high.

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A rendering of the bridge over Broadway.

N.B. The business of press releases is amusing. I received it at 5:56 AM with a subject line of “Mayor Emanuel Unveils Designs for Wilson Red Line station”. I’m glad Mayor Emanuel was up at that time unveiling these designs.

What’s up with all those K streets west of Pulaski?

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Photo by Jeff Zoline.

[This piece originally ran in Time Out Chicago magazine.]

Q: How did K-Town come to be? That stretch of the West Side with all the north-south streets whose names start with the letter K has always fascinated me.

A: The K streets extend for a mile west of Pulaski Road: Karlov, Kedvale, Keeler, Kildare, Kenneth, Kilbourn. The mile after that, the streets begin with the letter L (Lavergne, Lawler)—though you’d have trouble finding people repping L-Town as their ’hood. The mile after that? M streets. The alphabetical pattern continues through P.

In the Tribune in 1913, the superintendent of Chicago’s Bureau of Maps, John D. Riley, explained his department’s new proposal for renaming north-south streets: “Under this scheme a certain letter would be assigned for each mile beginning with ‘A’ for the first mile west of the Indiana state line.” Thus, roads 11 miles west of the Hoosier border start with K, the 11th letter of the alphabet.

Abby Kindelsperger responded to the Time Out article:
“Actually, as a teacher at Long & Chicago, I have to disagree that ‘you’d have trouble finding people repping L-Town as their ‘hood.’ My students who live in the surrounding L-streets certainly consider their neighborhood to be L-Town, and never use the city’s label of Austin. I suppose in a community that doesn’t feel much love from the city, renaming is a form of power.”

At the time, north-south streets west of Pulaski were numbered according to their distance from State Street, so the switch from digits to words was done to differentiate them from their numbered east-west counterparts on the South Side (two 42nd Streets might be confusing). The City Council rejected the proposal regarding roads east of Pulaski, which by then already had proper names like State Street and Michigan Avenue, since renaming them all would have been a major pain in the neck.

New cargo bike business wants to protect your windows

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Scott Baermann cleans windows at Ipsento on a sunny September afternoon. 

Scott Baermann has been in the window cleaning business for 10 years, mostly in northern Indiana. He operated that business from afar when he moved to Chicago in 2006. Earlier this year he took on his friend Ryan Hoban as a partner. But the future didn’t lie in northern Indiana, it was here in Chicago.

I interviewed the Urban Street Window Works guys in August at their “office” in Ipsento Coffee House in Bucktown. This was the same office at which Scott and Ryan decided to try storefronts as a way to break into business in the city, an industry they said was dominated by “one bucket wonders”.

Most people already have a guy, and they don’t know who it is. He just comes around a few times and you pay him $7, $8 bucks. We want to develop a relationship, in how we want to separate ourselves. We want them to know our names.

Our first storefront was Ipsento, I know Tim, I asked, “Who does your windows?” Shoot me a quote and we’ll talk. Tim bought the equipment himself, “but as you can see I don’t do a good job”.

Ipsento became their first customer. A walk around the neighborhood netted them a few more customers. The pair got bikes on their radar after the threat of parking tickets raised its ugly head (fortunately they didn’t get one on an early work call). They looked at trailers on Craigslist and bought a single wheel trailer in Evanston. Ryan mentioned the benefits of using a bike for work, saying, “We can be a lot more efficient. I love riding my bikes. So this is like a dream come true, riding my bike every day.” Continue reading New cargo bike business wants to protect your windows

Take action: Residents in 4 wards have opportunity to directly influence expenditure of $4 million on infrastructure

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The walls of the Mess Hall community center in Rogers Park are covered in project proposals, in 2010. Photo by Samuel Barnett. See more photos from Barnett.

Major updates, 11:17 AM

We received an email Participatory Budgeting Chicago manager Thea Crum, at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) Great Cities Institute, that four alderman will be conducting participatory budgeting in their wards, committing $4 million in discretionary spending (which is short of the $5.2 million in menu funds they have available).

The four alderman are:

  • Leslie Hairston, 5th
  • John Arena, 45th
  • James Cappleman, 46th (see details below)
  • Joe Moore, 49th

Continue reading Take action: Residents in 4 wards have opportunity to directly influence expenditure of $4 million on infrastructure