The city faces a big expense because of a non-compete clause in its parking-garage privatization deal. This will raise more skepticism about transparency with the proposed infrastructure trust… but it’s not like we got great transparency or oversight from prior privatization deals.
City Council signs off on a bike-share program (the same vendor as Washington, D.C., with the same pricing structure) and prepares to take on speed cameras; why Americans don’t walk; and more
A hunt for the location of a spectacular 1930s car elevator somewhere in Chicago’s Loop leads to an august Chicago manufacturer, and the immigrant inventor of dialectical materialism, no less than the “philosopher of socialism.”
Last night, just as I was falling asleep, unconfirmed reports came from the kids’ room that the dog had peed all over Max’s bed. A reconnaissance scout was sent to the hot zone to investigate, and promptly brought word that the rumor was, in fact, true. The dog had peed with extreme prejudice…
Because the White House remains “Chicago on the Potomac,”—although less so now with the exit of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod—it’s always fascinating to see how the latest Washington insider book portrays Chicagoans in the corridors of the West Wing. The latest of the genre is David Corn’s Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party…
A bit of booze (just below the legal limit!) makes you better able to perform creative tasks, though it makes your memory worse. Probably because it makes your memory worse. A UIC team got some students tipsy and plied them with creative questions to investigate.
Anywhere from nothing to $267 million in 2010, apparently The concepts are pretty simple, but figuring out a hard number is really hard—and even harder if you consider alternatives to Chicago’s TIF system.
Block 37 gets sold, again, as the city’s cursed retail block limps along in the manner we’ve become accustomed to over the past few decades. Here’s a (sort-of) brief history of Block 37: “to know Block 37 is to know Chicago.”
“OH MY GOD, IT’S RAINING HELL!”: Gary Krist’s ‘City of Scoundrels’ recounts Chicago’s unbelievable summer of 1919
Some notes on “Mr. Bellow’s Planet” by Brent Staples, an essay about Hyde Park in the 1970s and racial fears on its streets. Observed four decades ago, written two decades ago, it still sounds entirely familiar.
