I've got a secret

It's a happy secret. In case you were wondering about that goofy smile on my face.

But I'm not saying what it is.

Broadway survey: analysis

A roundup of the Broadway surveys from the 1/2-mile stretch between Foster and Bryn Mawr:
Broadway: 5200 block
Broadway: 5300 block
Broadway: 5400 block, west side
Broadway: 5400 block, east side
Broadway survey: 5500 block, west side
Broadway survey: 5500 block, east side

The only existing structure that is over the 4-story limit for B1-2 is St. Ita's. Of the 57 buildings in the survey area, two are four stories tall, one on the 5400 block, and one on the 5500 block. Here is a complete distribution of building heights (in stories):

Block	1 story	2 stories	3 stories	4 stories	>4 stories
5200	5	1	2	0	0
5300	4	3	1	0	0
5400	5	10	4	1	0
5500	6	7	6	1	1

The question that has been asked is whether Broadway should be zoned B1-2 or B1-3. The former would only allow for 4 story buildings, while the latter would allow buildings as tall as 6 stories. Clearly, the existing scale falls predominantly within the requirements of B1-2; St. Ita's bell tower is the sole exception. If a B1-1 zoning were being considered, I'd note that 94% of the existing structures are short enough to meet the B1-1 height requirement; however, some of these buildings, such as the Jewel supermarket, would likely fall outside B1-1 based on other factors.

In addition to height, there are also some questions of usage. For instance, how many residents know that there is a plastic parts manufacturer on the 5400 block of North Broadway? I would categorize this as an industrial use that does not fit in a retail zone.

Metapost: Testing HTML tables

Move along, nothing to see here. I'm testing Blogger's ability to insert tables in a post. At least in IE-6, the preview looks perfectly awful.

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Broadway survey: 5500 block, east side

5501-03 is a new four-story condo. 5501 is a sales office for another condo development. 5503 is a day spa and salon.
5505-09 is a 2-story older building occupied by an Asian food importer.
5511-13 is a 2-story older building with a Chinese restaurant on the first floor.
5515 is a residential 2-flat.
5517: Front part of the lot is a driveway and parking lot. Rear part is a small auto repair garage.
5519 is an older 2-story building. Use is not apparent from the exterior.
5521-23 is a residential 2-flat.
5525-29 is an older 2-story building occupied by a Vietnamese restaurant.
5531-43 is a single story building. Facade is modern. There is a second story above 5539. The building contains offices for local Democratic office holders, such as the alderman's office. Additionally, there appear to be two non-profit businesses, a sales office for a condominium development, and a vacant storefront.
5545 is a single story building that resembles a mausoleum. It might be some sort of Vietnamese house of worship.
5549 is an old 3-story building with a dentist occupying the first floor.
5551-53 is an older single story building. 5551 is a beauty salon. 5553 is the discount general merchandise store formerly located on the corner.
5555-57 is an old 3-story building that faces Bryn Mawr. The storefront at the corner is vacant, formerly occupied by the business at 5553 N. Broadway.

Broadway survey: 5500 block, west side

The survey is progressing ever so slowly, but I'm only a block away from having covered the entire section within the Edgewater Beach Neighbors Association's (EBNA) borders.

5500-10 is St. Ita Catholic Church. This is a large, stone church built in 1900. Excluding the bell tower, the building is about 54 feet tall (estimated by counting stone blocks), equivalent to about 4-1/2 stories. I do not know the height of the bell tower, but it easily rises to about 6 stories above street level. The bell tower is, by far, the tallest structure on this section of Broadway.
5512-20: The front part of the lot is parking for St. Ita. There are additional 3-story structures that are part of the church to the rear of the parking lot.
5522-24 is a single story building occupied by a dental office. '50s modern style.
5526-28 is a residential 2-flat.
5530 is a single story building containing a photo studio. Facade is recent.
5532-34 is a residential 3-flat.
5536-38 is a single story building. Storefronts occupied by light industry -- window treatment wholesaler. Storefronts have a vacant look.
5540-42 is a single story building. Occupied by same tenant as 5536-38.
5544-46 is a two-story older building. 5544 is a martial arts studio, and 5546 is a print/copy shop.
5548-52 is a 3-story older building. The first story facade has been completely redone recently. 5550 is vacant. 5552 is an independent video store.
5554-56 is a 3-story older building. The first story facade has been renovated to match 5548-52. 5554 is an insurance office. 5556 is a cell phone store.

Reviving Edward

The extended family took my grandfather out to Bob Chinn's in Wheeling for his 91st birthday. He can't participate much in mealtime conversation on account of his deafness, but he does like the halibut.

Toward the end of the meal, Grandpa put his elbows up on the table and cradled his forehead in his hands. He sat like that for a long minute, and when he lifted his head, we could see that all the color had gone out of his face. He nodded his head when asked if he was feeling dizzy, then lowered it to rest in his hands once more.

Grandpa gradually became less responsive. He closed his eyes and leaned back against my father. Suddenly, he slumped as if the air had been let out of him. At the sight of this, my stomach knotted around the grouper I had just eaten.

We asked for the check and a paramedic. The check arrived first. As my mother signed the receipt, Grandpa's right eye opened a crack. He slowly raised his arm and pointed at my mom, and with all the breath he could muster, he said, "I'll pay for that!"

We told him the receipt was already signed, but he was insistent -- he wanted to pay. And the more he protested, the more animated he became. And his color began to return. By the time the paramedics arrived, he was able to stand on his own, and he was indignant that they were even called.

Grandpa was driven home and seems to be doing well. The bruised ego will take some time to heal.

Do you Houyhnhnm?

As a graduate student at the University of Illinois, I was present for the birth of what we now think of as the World Wide Web. A user of an early beta version of NCSA Mosaic, I was just outside the delivery room, and what a beautiful baby it was. Suddenly, information seemed so easy to find! Surely, this would be the beginning of a new golden era!

A new era, yes. But golden?

I began to have my doubts when I saw my first virus hoax e-mail. The admin in my office had forwarded it to my whole group. Why had she done this, I asked her, when it was so easy to find out it was a hoax? It would have taken her a minute to do the necessary research on the internet. Her answer was that it took so little effort to forward the e-mail, and if it were true, she had done a good thing. Twain's observation -- that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on -- had now become literally true, even if truth doesn't literally wear boots.

I was dismayed to find that it didn't matter that it was so easy to check facts on the internet, because few people were inclined to do so. So all sorts of plausible falsehoods, urban legends, and opinions based on ignorance were more likely to propagate on the web than vexing truths.

Now when I hear the word "yahoo," I associate it with both the internet and a certain book by Jonathan Swift. And I worry that there's too much yahoo on the internet.

Superdawg

I've already confessed my love of encased meats.

In my neighborhood, we have Huey's -- kosher dogs, and open on Sundays. I've also enjoyed Hot Doug's at Roscoe and California, owned by a guy named Doug.

But these hot dog stands, while very good, are mere upstarts compared to Superdawg at the corner of Devon and Milwaukee. Haven't been there? Then put this on your short list of things to do before you die. And I highly recommend visiting their website.

I was sure this hot dog stand must have stood at this intersection from the beginning of time, but research reveals that it actually opened in 1948. In any case, this is the hot dog stand that time forgot; it looks exactly the same today as I have always remembered it. Back when I was growing up, one way to get to my grandparents' Rogers Park home was to head down Devon Ave, past the colossus of anthropomorphic lunch meat. So I always associated Superdawg with visits to my grandparents.

My sister, my brother in law, and I stopped there today on our way out to points northwest, and it was hopping! Superdawg is a drive-in with about two dozen spaces, and all were taken. So we had to park on the sidewalk, outside the jurisdiction of any carhop, and place our orders inside. Hot dogs come in a cute little box with fries and a pickled green tomato. The hot dog itself was good but not exceptional, but bonus points for the tomato! And the fries were excellent.

Painting

I did a couple still lifes last month. My mom wanted to see them, so I took these pictures with my digital camera and e-mailed them to her. Then I thought I might as well post them here. Variations on a theme:

Torture is wrong

'Nuff said.

Chicago Cares Part II

It might be apparent from my previous posting that I'm a tad ambivalent about the whole Chicago Cares event.

I've known some CPS teachers, and all of them tell me stories about how not enough funds make it to the classroom. The Chicago Cares projects gave the volunteers a taste of that. My team was driven to the John Hay Academy, an 80-year-old elementary school in the Austin neighborhood. In a six hour span, two hundred of us were to paint the walls of the auditorium, the library, the computer lab, the gym, and a few classrooms. But we lacked necessary materials -- we only had a few ladders in the whole school, and we had an insufficient number of extension poles for the rollers. Furthermore, the quality of the materials was poor -- the paintbrushes hardly held any paint, the rollers shed clumps of fiber onto the wall, and the roller covers would frequently spin right off the roller. Amazingly, we still managed to do a decent job.

As for the corporate flavor of the event... I don't want to take away from the good work that was done, but if I had to choose between tax dollars and volunteers, I'd take the tax dollars. It's unfortunate that it has to be an either-or proposition.

Take, for instance, Boeing, a newcomer to Chicago and a sponsor of the Chicago Cares event. I found an interesting article about Boeing's move at the Site Selection trade magazine's website. To entice Boeing to move here, the city and state governments handed the company an incentive package worth over $60 million over the next 20 years. All this for a few hundred Boeing employees -- executives and their support staff. According to the article, the marquee on the Chicago Theatre announced the deal with: "Chicago Wins! Welcome Boeing." But who really won?

One day each year, a number of corporations -- not just Boeing -- put on the mask of good corporate citizen for the Chicago Cares event. They offer well-meaning people to help apply a mask of fresh paint to crumbling schools. But more than paint, these schools need funding to sustain them.

Sensenbrenner is an ASS

Darn... I hate when I get typos in the title of my article. What I really meant to say is that Sensenbrenner is a fASciSt. There, that's better.

I've never been much of a fan of the Republican congressman representing Wisconsin's fifth district; in fact, I even went up to Wisconsin last fall to help campaign for his opponent, Bryan Kennedy. But he still managed to lower my opinion of him with his Real ID Act, a controversial immigration bill that he tacked onto a vitally important military spending bill that was voted on in May.

And then there was last Friday's hearing on the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. Prior to Friday's hearing, the House Judiciary Committee had held a number of hearings on the act in which Sensenbrenner, the committee's chairman, would only allow testimony on the act's less controversial provisions. So the Democrats on the committee asked for an additional hearing to take testimony from opponents of the Patriot Act.

Just under two hours into the hearing, Sensenbrenner launched into a monologue in which he attacked the witnesses and the committee's Democrats as being irresponsible. He stated that he had listened patiently enough, but thank you, the hearing is adjourned. Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) raised a point of order, but Sensenbrenner pounded his gavel, got up, and left the room along with the other Republicans on the committee. There was never any motion to adjourn.

The microphones were turned off, and as Democrats and other participants continued to speak, the recorder was told to stop entering the testimony into the record. But while the final minutes of the hearing may not appear in the official record, they were captured on C-SPAN, and we the people can watch and know what happened.

Here are some links:
Dembloggers.com video: Sensenbrenner gavels hearing to a close.
Video Part 2: Remaining participants have their say.
Air America's Randi Rhodes interviews Sheila Jackson Lee.

And I did a rough transcription of the end of the hearing (below in the comments).

Andersonville Midsommarfest / Cafe Boost

We're past Memorial Day, so it's the season for summer neighborhood street festivals. But couldn't the Midsommarfest at least wait until the solstice?

Andersonville was once predominantly Swedish, hence the Swedish festival name. These days the neighborhood is more diverse, but it still is an important center of Swedish culture in Chicago. Where else in the city can one get fresh lingonberries?

Unfortunately, these neighborhood street festivals don't really represent the neighborhoods all that well. There are typically some booths for local businesses, artists, restaurants, etc. But there are also a fair number of outsiders operating food concessions or selling tie-dyed silks and T-shirts. It's like this at all the festivals, so the festivals all feel very similar to one another.

News about Cafe Boost

The food at the festival itself was a little disappointing, so I went with my sister and my brother in law up to Cafe Boost at 5400 N. Clark, where we knew we could get something good to eat. There I got the sad news that on June 20, they will brew their last cup of coffee.

Cafe Boost was nice, quiet coffee shop that was walking distance from my home. I never tried their coffee; I always went in the summer and ordered a scoop of Homer's ice cream. It will be missed.

Chicago Cares Serve-A-Thon

Yesterday was the annual Chicago Cares Serve-A-Thon, a day for Chicago-area corporations to send volunteers, in lieu of tax dollars, to help support Chicago public schools.

I took the Red Line down to the Soldier Field staging area. By the time I got to the Fullerton stop, my car was full, and I noticed that at least half the passengers were wearing Chicago Cares T-shirts.

It will be some time before I'll be able to erase from my mind the vision of thousands of tacky corporate-logo T-Shirts. Hello Moto. The Pepsi Generation is Making a Difference. Nobody better not like Sara Lee, dammit. And at Siemens, We can do that! -- even paint the school library.

I nominate Motorola for Most Boring T-shirt. Whereas most corporations gave out volunteer T-shirts designed just for the occasion, Motorola's shirts were just plain blue with the white flying 'M' logo on the back. I think it's the same T-shirt I got from them back when I was in college, and Motorola was recruiting on campus.

Contents of my goodie bag (oh joy!):

From Motorola: "What does volunteerism mean 2 U" contest. Send an essay via text messaging by June 12 (today); the two best entries win a phone.
From Microsoft: Free 60-day trial of Microsoft Office OneNote software. Can also be used as a coaster.
From Chicago Sun-Times: Subscription form offering 45% off newsstand price. Which is the same discount you get on any year-long subscription.
From Jewel Food Stores: Coupon for a free bag of cookies.
From Washington Mutual: A ballpoint pen.
From UnitedHealthcare: A toothbrush, a travel case for the toothbrush, and a package of four adhesive bandages.
From United Airlines: 15% off airfare, good until mid-August, or until United goes out of business, whichever comes first.

The goodie bag -- that's what volunteerism means to me. (But I'm perplexed as to why I didn't win that phone.) As for the actual volunteer work, I'll describe that in Part II.

Governator strikes again!

Traffic was heavy this afternoon for my drive home on the inbound Edens. Why? Because Arnold was back in town, and someone chose the middle of rush hour to have his motorcade drive the expressway, blocking all southbound lanes. Damn you, Arnold! Damn your black heart!

I can suggest an alternate route for him that would be less disruptive to us little folk, should he again find himself needing to travel from the North Shore suburbs into the city.

He might start in Libertyville, where Marlon Brando grew up. A few miles east on Route 60 will take him to Lake Forest, present home of John Cleese (although I have my doubts as to whether Monty Python is his kind of humor). Rte 60 ends at Rte 41. After a jog south on Rte 41 and east again on Westleigh, he comes to Green Bay Road, which he can take south to Highland Park. The stretch of Green Bay that runs from here south to Winnetka was used in the movie Risky Business. It passes through Glencoe, home to Ghostbuster Harold Ramis.

At Tower Road, Gov. Schwarzenegger would want to head east to Sheridan Road, and then continue south on Sheridan. He'd soon arrive in Wilmette, birthplace of another Ghostbuster: Bill Murray.

The next town south of Wilmette is Evanston, where both Charlton Heston and John Cusack were born. Through Evanston, Sheridan is, oddly enough, discontinuous in several places. But it does at last lead to Chicago. And if Arnold can get past the gridlock that starts at Touhy, he just might make it downtown before nightfall.

Why The Governator was in town

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I was nearly blindsided by Arnold Schwarzenegger as I was exiting a Michigan Avenue store. What was he doing here? Today I found out.

The Governator can't rely only on his glowing red eyes to persuade Californians to vote for him. He also needs money to run a political campaign.

Schwarzenegger was in Chicago as part of a fundraising trip for the 2005 ballot initiative campaign in which he traveled to Illinois, Florida, and Texas and raised about $3 million.

California contains approximately one eighth of U.S. population, and it counts for an even larger share of economic activity. As an independent state, it would be the world's sixth largest economy. So it is no surprise that many corporations and individuals from outside California might have an interest in seeing Schwarzenegger's ballot measures succeed. But it also raises the question as to whether he has another, higher office in mind -- perhaps in 2008? (Not that I'm so enthusiastic about the idea.)

Willful ignorance tanks

There was a time when I took the term "think tank" at face value. A place for learned people to think about weighty matters and do serious, honest research. I imagined a think tank to be a happy, ivory tower where all our problems were being solved. And being an engineer, I imagined the tank to be in the shape of a cylindrical pressure vessel.

But it turns out that the driving force behind think tanks isn't the search for truth -- it's money. And most of the money comes from wealthy, conservative business interests. Here is what the business interests do. They identify an issue that could impact their profits, and they go to one of these think tanks and give them money and ask if they can do a study that will support the side of the issue that will increase their profits. With the conclusion determined beforehand, the think tank produces a "study" that they publicize and use to influence public opinion and public policy.

Mind you, some of their positions may actually be correct. But the work is tainted by conflicts of interest. So it's hard to trust any of it as being honest and unbiased.

Some examples of right-wing think tanks are the Heritage Foundation, AEI, Cato Institute, RAND, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Hoover Institution, and the Family Research Council. FAIR does an annual study where they count the number of think tank citations in the media. They found that in 2003, only two of the top twelve groups could be classified as left of center.

Chicago is a left-of-center city, but even here a right-wing think tank called the Heartland Institute has found a home for itself. That's a topic for another day...

A foggy morning

Visibility was at most a quarter mile when I took my morning walk today, and the water lapping against the breakwater seemed condensed out of the gray mist.

An old, withered man in a motorized wheelchair sat alone where the seawall meets Foster Beach, staring out into the emptiness. I stood observing him for a while; and all the while he remained motionless.

I thought, someday, that could be me. But then, someday, that could be anybody.

This American Life: Godless America

I timed my trip home this evening to coincide with the broadcast of This American Life on WBEZ Chicago Public Radio. The theme of tonight's program was separation of church and state. How awesome was it? When I arrived home at 7:40, at the beginning of Julia Sweeney's segment, I sat in the car for the next twenty minutes until the program ended. If you missed it, WBEZ (91.5FM) will rebroadcast it on June 4 at 1:00.

The program mentions the Ohio Restoration Project, an effort by conservative Christians to recruit at least 2000 "Patriot Pastors" (more like partisan pastors) to help elect Republican Kenneth Blackwell governor of Ohio. (Many believe Blackwell helped elect Bush in the 2004 election by suppressing Democratic turnout.) And there was a segment by Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, one of my favorite civil liberties organizations.

In one segment, host Ira Glass interviewed Isaac Kramnick, author of The Godless Constitution. Kramnick made an interesting point. The Religious Right has this narrative in which our nation was founded as a Christian nation and that our laws were based on Biblical law. According to the narrative, things remained this way until the 1960s, that horrible, horrible decade, when suddenly the forces of secularism began to push Christianity out of public life. A compelling story... but false.

Says Kramnick, the U.S. Constitution was clearly intended from the start to define the state as being entirely secular. And back when the document was first ratified, it was over the objections of the Religious Right's 18th-century counterparts. There have been several attempts throughout U.S. history to amend the constitution to make Protestant Christianity the country's official religion. But the necessity of separating church and state was well understood by students of history, and these amendments always failed. Contrary to the Religious Right's narrative, it was in the middle of the 20th century, when we were fighting those "Godless Communists", that the wall between church and state began to erode and the idea of a secular government began to come under attack.

Inhale... exhale...

I just had to post something today.

The big pink building

If you've ever driven all the way to the north end of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, you've seen it. It is that big pink building, otherwise known as the Edgewater Beach Apartments. It used to be even more pink around fifteen years ago -- obnoxiously Pepto-Bismol pink. Over the last five years, the facade has been restored, and the color has been toned down to a pale terra cotta, similar to what it must have been when it was first built in the early part of the last century.



The Edgewater Beach Apartments are the last remnant of the old Edgewater Beach resort complex, featuring the Edgewater Beach Hotel. If you've ever seen old posters promoting Chicago tourism, and they have a scene of a grandiose edifice rising out of the sand, with people in hats and funny-looking bathing suits frolicking on the beach, you might wonder what alternate universe this is supposed to depict. The scene is of the Edgewater Beach Hotel, once the place to play on Chicago's far north side.

I took the above picture this morning from a place that would have been well out over the waters of Lake Michigan back when the resort was in its heyday. Around 1960, Lake Shore Drive was extended north to Hollywood Ave, and the resort was in the way of progress. (If you look closely, you can see the highway in the foreground of the photo.) Once the road was built, the hotel, deprived of its beach, was no longer such an attractive destination. A decade later, it was gone.