The Chicago City Council has finally passed a long-needed set of revisions to the city’s noise regulations concerning street performers. After months of contentious debate, I guess as it turns out downtown residents really do have the right to be able to hear themselves think in their own homes.
Receipts at the Millennium Park Garage continue to dwindle far below the maintenance costs of Chicago’s showpiece lakefront park, which the monies were supposed to cover. Bad. Helping to fund the renewal of a vibrant, transit-friendly, walkable downtown by attracting more vehicle congestion into it? Worse.
Yesterday, the Sun-Times published my response to a December 6th Commentary piece on the debate over the right of downtown Chicago residents to demand noise controls on street musicians. They said downtowners should wear earplugs. I said, are you kidding me?
Chicagoist tells downtown residents to deal with illegal drummers as the price of living downtown. Um, excuse me?
Today was the groundbreaking ceremony for the long-awaited Block 37 development. So at least until 2007, farewell to a great poor-weather friend: the portion of Chicago’s sizeable underground pedestrian walkway between State and Dearborn Streets.
A report released today shows hard evidence for what I’ve long been claiming: besides being one of the easiest downtowns to live in without a car, Downtown Chicago is the fastest growing and most livable residential downtown in the United States.
Chicago’s long-awaited Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial was dedicated this morning just across the river from my house, on Lower Wacker Drive between Wabash and State. I shot a bunch of pictures of the ceremony as I was walking to work.
The street work that closed the Wabash Avenue Bridge is coming to an end. As the cute little sand tubers exit the east end of IBM Plaza and cars return, something else will exit, too: quiet.
The Project for Public Spaces assesses Chicago’s universally loved Millennium Park and labels it a failure. Judging by the heavy use the park gets from Windy City locals, you have to wonder whether the organization actually visited it in the first place.
The latest casualty in U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald’s long-overdue war on Chicago municipal graft, Shirley McMayon, made the classic Hogtown mistake. She assumed no one was watching, and she didn’t bother to launder the money.