Archive for the ‘local’ Category
Suburban blight
March 12th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
As I mentioned last week, I’ve started biking to work again after the winter layoff. This is the first year it’s been consistently warm enough1 to start bicycle commuting in March, and because the frost is still working its way out of the ground, I’ve been leery of taking my normal route on the crushed limestone paths through the Springbrook Prairie Preserve and along the Southern DuPage County Regional Trail. So my way to work has been mostly on sidewalks adjacent to busy roads in Naperville and Aurora. And it’s unrelentingly ugly.
Much of the ugliness is a winter’s worth of garbage that’s floated down gutters and blown up against fences and shrubs and hasn’t been cleaned up by street sweepers and property owners yet. The sidewalks are filled with broken glass flung out of passing cars. In one spot, I pass a dead woodchuck, recently uncovered by the melting snow.
South of the Fox Valley Shopping Mall is a particularly ugly stretch, where a trenching operation dumped mud over half the sidewalk and left the site without cleaning it up.
Some parts of my route aren’t actually ugly, but are signs of decline, nonetheless. West of the muddy sidewalk, still adjacent to Fox Valley, is a blocklong stripmall that was built two years ago and is absolutely pristine because it hasn’t had a single tenant.
Local kids come to skateboard in the parking lot and do tricks on the concrete planter walls. Police park at the end of the strip, filling out paperwork and pointing their radar guns out into the streets that border the mall. I ride through the parking lot to get a break from the bump-bump-bump of riding on sidewalks. The big glass storefronts make good mirrors.
On my way home this evening, I decided to get off the busy streets and try the path in Springbrook. The trail was mushy in only a few spots; mostly it was bumpy from the solidified footprints of joggers who had run along the trail when it was all soft. It was slow going and hard pedaling, but it was fun to be away from the streets, if only for a couple of miles.
I stopped to take a picture of this tree.
Last year, I took weekly photos of a few places in Springbrook, hoping to create some interesting sequences. The only subject I was happy with was this tree, and unfortunately I didn’t start photographing it until late June, so the sequence doesn’t cover as much of the tree’s seasonal changes as I’d like. This year I’m getting an earlier start.
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If the global warming deniers were intellectually honest, they’d be making as big a deal out of the recent warm weather in the upper Midwest as they did about the East Coast snow in February. But if they were intellectually honest, they wouldn’t be global warming deniers, would they? ↩
Tags: aurora, biking, naperville
Post #1196 in biking, local | No Comments
The wrong sort
December 7th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Tonight I was killing time in Naperville’s Nichols Library, looking through the computer books. NPL uses the Dewey Decimal System for assigning catalog numbers, so I was in the 005 section when I ran across this book with a call number on the spine of 005.8 BIS.
It’s a pop sociology book, and obviously has no place in the computer section. I someone on staff saw the word “sort” in the title and started thinking bubble, shell, heap, quick,…, big. Despite the mistake, I’m kind of impressed that a librarian would look at that title and make a CS connection.
I got curious and looked it up at the Library of Congress site when I got home. According to the LOC, the Dewey number should be 305.800973 22, which puts it in the social sciences where it belongs. I had always assumed libraries used the numbers assigned by the LOC and didn’t try to do their own classification. In this case, that would have worked out better.
Post #1127 in education, local | No Comments
Another mess from Chicago’s freight tunnels
October 15th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Yesterday afternoon, a section of pavement on the Kennedy Expressway, which runs north/south through Chicago, heaved up. leading to a major rerouting of traffic and an hasty—and apparently successful—effort to get the roadway repaired before the morning rush.
Early reports are that the heave was caused by upward pressure from a concrete pumping operation. The concrete was being pumped to fill a section of the old freight tunnels that run under much of the downtown area. These tunnels are notorious for causing the Great Chicago Flood of 1992.
I was one of many engineers involved in the investigation of the Great Flood and was down in the tunnels shortly after it was drained, so the tunnels and I go back a ways. Two things struck me when I heard the news about the heaved pavement:
- The tunnels generally don’t extend more than a few blocks west of the the Chicago River. The Kennedy seemed too far west to have any freight tunnels under it.
- The tunnels are typically about 40 feet below street level; in fact, the definitive book on the tunnels is Forty Feet Below: The Story of Chicago’s Freight Tunnels by Bruce Moffat. Even if a section of tunnel were below the Kennedy, how could pumping concrete so far underground have an immediate effect on the surface?
I went to my copy of Moffat and looked at some old maps of the tunnel system. It turns out there was a spur under Quincy Street that ran almost as far west as Halsted. This puts it under what is now the Kennedy Expressway just south of Adams, which is where the heave occurred. Also, there was a “public station” in that area between Quincy and Jackson, which indicates an area that came up close to the surface and/or a vertical shaft. So my two doubts were erased.
This image is from the Wikipedia article on the tunnels, which seems to have been derived largely from Moffat’s book. There’s also a Wikipedia article on the flood, which, despite the despite the warning about possible unreliability at the top, matches pretty well with my memory of the incident.
The tunnels are pretty interesting in their own right. They were cut, mostly by hand, about 100 years ago through the blue clay that lies under downtown Chicago. The passages were roughly oval with a flat bottom, about 6 feet wide and 7-8 feet high, and were lined with concrete. Much of the excavated clay was hauled up out of the tunnels and dumped into the lake east of Michigan Avenue, making what is now Grant Park.
The tunnels ran under the streets and were used to deliver freight—mostly coal—to downtown buildings. A narrow-gauge railroad ran on tracks installed in the tunnel floors with cars that looked like something from an amusement park kiddie ride.
This image is one of many you’ll find at this freight tunnel history site.
Post #1061 in local | No Comments
Naperville biking
August 4th, 2009 at 8:00 am
An unusual bike accident occurred in Naperville last week. According to news reports, two high school-aged boys were riding their bikes on the sidewalk in the downtown business district. A cop told them they had to ride in the street. One of the boys was then hit by a car driven by an older woman. According to the boy, she gunned the engine and drove at him. He jumped off the bike just before impact, avoiding serious injuries. The car drove off, with parts of the bike still in the grill or undercarriage.
Several motorists reportedly used their wireless telephones to call police and report the car driving away with Peterson’s bicycle beneath its wheels.
The car and the woman were later tracked down and she’s facing felony charges.
In a followup story, the Naperville Sun interviewed three people, all of whom work at local bike shops, looking for advice on how drivers and cyclists can avoid accidents. I have nothing against the guys interviewed, and I understand that it’s easy for the reporter to find regular cyclists among bike shop staff, but I don’t think this group makes for a particularly balanced pool of interviewees. You’re likely to find pretty extreme cyclists in bike shop workers. For example, one of the three—presumably an adult—doesn’t own a car and was quoted as saying “Cars are evil.” Not your typical suburbanite. I happen to know one of the other guys; it wasn’t mentioned in the article, but he rides to work year-round. Over ten miles each way. In northern Illinois. I ride a lot, and even I think that’s crazy.
I’m in downtown Naperville fairly often—in my car or with my bike or on foot—and I’m quite familiar with its automobile, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic. More so, I suspect, than the three guys interviewed for the story, none of whom actually live in Naperville or work near downtown. Since the Sun didn’t bother to interview me, I’ll give my opinions here.
First, the driver has no business behind the wheel. Whether she hit the bike deliberately or not, it seems indisputable that she drove for over a mile with the bike tangled in her car. She’s either dangerously angry or dangerously oblivious and needs to be off the road.
Second, the kids shouldn’t have been riding their bikes on downtown sidewalks. Apart from what the law says, that’s just simple courtesy. There are too many pedestrians. Of course, courtesy is not a quality generally associated with teen-agers, so it’s not surprising to hear that they needed to a reminder.
However, if a police officer told the kids to ride in the street, he or she should be reprimanded. Naperville motorists aren’t used to seeing bikes on their downtown roads and aren’t likely to be good at sharing the lanes. Again, I don’t care what the law says about bikes having a right to be on the street; it’s dangerous to ride on the street in downtown Naperville.1 The cop should have told them to walk their bikes on the sidewalk until they were out of the crowded business district.
Overall, I think Naperville is pretty bike-friendly; there are many bike lanes and bike paths around town. But downtown is definitely bike-hostile. The only bike lane there I can think of is ridiculous.
I swear this picture is not photoshopped, although a CSI-style outline of a body would be an appropriate addition between the dashed lines. There really is a bike lane that swings out from the right curb, crosses a lane of traffic, and then runs between two lanes of autos. It’s on one of the few streets downtown that cross the DuPage River, so car traffic is steady—it took me a while to get a photo with just one car (note also that the car has strayed into the bike lane). The idea clearly is to keep cyclists away from the right-turning cars at the intersection, but it’s a fair question to ask whether that was to make it safer for the cyclists or easier for the cars. Whatever the answer, you won’t catch me riding in that lane.
Post #893 in blogging, local, news | No Comments
Naperville Apple Store slowly unveiled
July 29th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
This evening I was walking through downtown Naperville and saw the partial unveiling of its future Apple Store. Work has been going on for some months behind a sheath of black plywood. I happened to be there as workers unscrewed the board with the Apple logo.
A while later, I went back to see the real translucent logo on the building façade.
When I left, the lower part of the store was still hidden, but I assume this means the store will be opening soon. And there will be much rejoicing.
Post #885 in iphone, local, mac | No Comments
Who’s running against Judy Biggert?
August 5th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Here are two reasons I won’t be voting for my current congresswoman, Judy Biggert, this fall:
- She’s a Republican, and I’ve promised myself that I’ll never vote for a Republican for national office again. If you don’t understand that, you haven’t been paying attention.
- I just walked into my house to find my answering machine participating in a telephonic town hall meeting with Biggert. My phone was robo-called, and because the answering machine didn’t press the right key to decline—I’ve got to get one of those answering machines with fingers—it got patched into the call. If I hadn’t come in just a few minutes after the call started, my line would have been tied up for who knows how long and the machine’s memory would have been filled up.
I don’t know if this was a case of stupidity or rudeness. Mostly, I think it was a case of Republicanism.
Post #443 in local, politics | No Comments
NIU shooting
February 14th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
The report of today’s shootings at Northern Illinois University was not just a news story to us in the Chicago area. Lots of local kids go there; everyone in my neighborhood knows a student—or knows the parents of a student—at NIU. My daughter, safe at another school, has been frantically texting and calling her friends at Northern. They’re all fine, but I won’t be surprised to learn in the next few days of a connection with one or more of the victims. Kids the same age as my daughter, gone forever.
As my wife and I were running errands this evening, we heard interviews on the radio with students who were in the class and escaped. There was a strange matter-of-factness in the way they talked, as if they had watched someone else rather than lived through it themselves. I suppose it will seem more real to them in a day or so.
This tragedy comes not only on the heels of other school shootings in Louisiana, Tennessee, and California, but just a week or so after a shooting in a suburban Chicago clothing store. There were five victims in that incident, too.
The public reaction to shootings like these has changed since I was a kid. In the 60s and 70s, these incidents would lead to calls for tougher gun control laws. Now they seem to always lead to nutty arguments for concealed-carry laws. I’ve already seen letters to the editor claiming that the clothing store shootings wouldn’t have happened if the store’s customers had been packing heat, and I won’t be surprised to see the same thing in response to the NIU story. This is almost as disturbing as the shootings themselves—not just that there are idiots who think it’s a good idea to have several people spraying bullets around, but that there’s no embarrassment associated with expressing those thoughts in public. Newspaper editors think it’s an opinion worth publishing.
Angry thoughts at the end of a bad day. I should just go to sleep.
Post #356 in local | No Comments
Primary Day
March 21st, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Today is primary election day in Illinois, but I don’t think I’ll be voting. Because the local officials, state representatives, and US representative from my area are always Republicans—and Illinois has an open primary system—I usually grab a Republican ballot and try to pick the least objectionable candidate. I assume Republicans in Chicago do the same thing with Democratic ballots.
(In 1992, I was so focused on the local elections that I forgot I would be voting in the Presidential primary. [The nominations are usually wrapped up by time Illinois’s primary comes around.] So there I was, staring at a ballot with George Bush and Pat Buchanan as my choices. I established my paleo-conservative credentials by voting Buchanan, and he rewarded me by giving the “culture war” speech at the convention that may have thrown the election to Clinton. Clinton was the first presidential winner I ever voted for.)
But this year I can’t bring myself to vote Republican, even in a primary. The war, the corruption, the fundamentally criminal behavior of the national Republican party—I just can’t do it.
If I lived a few blocks to the west, I’d probably force myself to the polls, because there’s a school referendum for that district on the ballot and it’s pretty heated. I see a lot of yard signs about it on my drive to work; my favorite is
VOTE YES!
No Overcrowding
Voting Yes for No is primary voting in a nutshell.
Post #81 in local, politics | No Comments
Journey back in time
March 17th, 2006 at 12:58 am
Today I went to Kara, an engineering supply store, to get a pocket penetrometer and a pocket rod. Only civil engineers—the same people who talk abut “erection aids” without thinking about sex—could come up with product names like these.
Kara is in Countryside, one of the closer-in western suburbs of Chicago. Its name may have been appropriate a hundred years ago, but there’s precious little country in Countryside today. Kara itself is next door to the giant ElectroMotive Diesel facility, a vast industrial wasteland dedicated to producing monstrous locomotive engines. This is how it looks on Google Maps. Zoom in to see the beautiful countryside.
Driving toward Chicago on surface streets rather than an expressway is like driving backward in time. As you go through the older and older suburbs, the architecture shifts, and today’s electronics superstores and chain restaurants give way to storefront appliance shops and “retro” diners that aren’t really retro, they just haven’t changed in 50 years. When I was in college, I had a friend who thought he grew up in the 50s. “Art,” I’d tell him, you were born in 1959. You grew up in the 60s and 70s.” Then I visited his hometown of Skokie and realized that he had been right—even in the 80s and 90s Skokie was solidly in the 50s. I haven’t been there in a while, but I expect it still is.
In addition to the things-that-sound-like-sex-toys-but-aren’t, Kara sells drafting equipment, and I picked up a new Staedtler Mars 780 leadholder.
I have a few of these and they are built to last forever, but I worry about losing them and Staedtler ceasing production, leaving me without my favorite writing instrument. I’ve never understood people’s preference for those clicky mechanical pencils with the wimpy leads that break under the slightest pressure. The leads in a leadholder are 2 mm in diameter; the only way they can break is if you oversharpen them, and even then you’ll only break off a small portion of the tip.
Last year, I added a couple of paragraphs to the 43 Folders wiki on the value of leadholders. At the time I was using 2H leads, which are pretty hard. The advantage of hard leads is they almost never need sharpening, the disadvantage is they leave a relatively light line. The light lines never bothered me before, but in the last year I’ve been trying out softer leads to make things easier on my aging eyes. Still haven’t decided between H and HB.
I think my worries about Staedtler no longer making the 780 are well-founded. Like the diners and small appliance shops in Countryside, leadholders are an anachronism and will slowly fade from the scene. Me too.
Post #79 in local | No Comments
The first thing we do…
February 27th, 2006 at 1:22 am
In the business section of today’s Chicago Tribune, there’s an article about some bankruptcy attorney from Kirkland & Ellis. The photo that accompanies the article shows him in his office next to a gigantic portrait of John Wayne. The lawyer’s pose is sort of a mirror of Duke’s (I feel certain he calls Wayne “Duke” when he talks to the portrait). His hands are on his hips, his gut is sucked in, and he has that “women want him, men want to be him” look that can only come from spending 12 hours a day on the telephone.
He credits his great success to his bartending and wrestling experience, but it’s clear that he only tended bar for a while during college and hasn’t wrestled since high school. Of course, he did go to high school at New Trier, well known in Chicagoland as the training ground for the city’s baddest-assed arbitragers and urologists.
The article is here, but unfortunately the picture isn’t part of the online story. Your loss.
Post #67 in local | No Comments