I'm sorry Jack, I hate to nitpick this, but I just don't get the same numbers as you, and when you're talking about transit distance, I think it is important. I'm looking directly at google maps, it is clearly 18-20 miles to Elmhurst, Lombard is a little further, Westchester a little closer. When I punch in Wrigley to the loop, I get 5.2 miles going down Clark.
Those western suburban lines better bring in some serious loads of people as you are describing, since they are going to be bringing them 3 to 4 times as far of a distance.
Synergy - the middle of Elmhurst to the middle of the Loop is 16 miles. To York and Roosevelt in South Elmhurst where the line would run to the circle interchange is 11 miles.
Lletdown the westside is already connected to the Loop via the Blue Line A and B trains the B being the new Pink line. It has doen nothing to help the residents or businesses. They are only connected to the Loop essentially and have little to no access to the suburban job centers. The inner city is well served by north/ south and east / west bus lines.
The problem is as you state the CTA stands for the Chicago Transit Authority. Take out the "C" and add an "R" and we could have a truely regional transit system, then you will see some real change.
I did a mapquest and your right its 16 miles. Ive driven it for 20 years I thought it was 12 or so. I guess we should just pack it up and shelve it then.
Jack... obviously transit is not the silver bullet, there are other policies that need to be looked at, and other investments required to bring back those neighborhoods. However, transit is absolutely central to any neighborhood rebuilding itself.
Id also really, really disagree that the El lines do nothing to help their residents. Areas immedietely surrounding El platforms are almost ALWAYS better developed than areas only 2 blocks from a platform.
Ha, naw it is fine. It is just that when numbers start flying around, I like to make sure we atleast roughly agree on the basic facts.
As for the near west side, I think I can agree with your point. really I'm not sure how the circle line will impact things. It seems like it would be nice to be able circumvent going through the through the loop when you want to get from a location on the brown line to a location on the green or orange, but really it doesn't seem like a major demand to me. Is there really any sort of arterial demand of people making such a trip on a daily basis?
Would the west side be better served by a new line running a straight shot, roughly splitting between the north legs of the blue and green lines, sort of running along grand ave? Obviously new lines are incredible expensive, but in terms of the logic, would this make more sense?
Suburban transit lines never do well unless the suburbs were developed around transit. It's like when exurban development puts in bicycle paths on county highways with speed limits off 55 mph and wonders why it hasn't solved any quality-of-life issues.
That being said, find an area of Chicago with enough open real estate to run another rail line without the cost of the project skyrocketing into the hundred of millions of dollars due to property acquisition.
I'd save the money on that and the billions of dollars of money the DOT has spent on interstate lane widening to redevelop a neighborhood like Bridgeport, Canaryville or Kenwood.
Because the only way you're going to be able to add more trains and bring up the density to support more business and more transit is by wiping away parts of these cities clean.
Orochi the near west suburbs are already laid out around Metra Train lines however there are gaps, such as the Roosevelt Road Corridor. This is not a typical suburban area like found around most cities. Its very dense, very job rich, very well served already by transit but could be further improved. My stand is build them both.
I think this discussion is good the CTA is a complex beast. Let me make a few points, the RTA is an umbrella organization that covers Pace Metra and CTA. It might be efficient to merge all three into one agency, problem is the suburbs might have the most clout so this has been resisted by the Royal family of Chicago.
The subways we have with the exception of a small stretch on the blue line are not cost effective and will not pay for themselves. The cost of tunneling in Chicago is much higher than in other metro areas due to the soft clay and high watter table. Geology has helped in determining that Chicago will have and EL. The WPA subways were jobs creating projects.
here is the preferred scheme for the circle line.... looks like the line will not actually connect to the north west blue line and north brown/red lines.
Who are the potential riders on the westside? Theres no jobs, 1/2 the land is vacant
But that's the whole point, Jack : these areas (and everyone's forgetting the South Side, which has historically been hugely developed and only now is full of empty land) are OPEN space within city limits that need to be encouraged to grow more densely. Part of the reason that nobody lives (or works) there is that there is no transit there. I see where you're coming from with wanting more suburban service, but the fact is that we have to develop the density in a tighter area first -- this is not only an urban economic priority but a greater ecological priority as well.
Re : the circle lines -- yes the current proposals are ass-backwards, in my opinion. If you're going to put in a circle line, it needs to connect the blue and brown lines and pick up the west side, then curve around to serve pilsen / bridgeport and end at green line. The Western Ave. corridor would be the perfect place to start, or further west to Kimball even, then cutting back in to run east somewhere near Cermak, perhaps. Or further south. That's an idea, at least.
Synergy, I think you're underestimating the amount of people that need to get from north to near west or south side but not over near the lake. I take this commute frequently and have been very suprised at the number of people taking the long haul with me. Part of your problem with the loop el (which I agree with) would be alleviated if we didn't all have to be routed through the loop. I imagine we're probably all northsiders here -- imagine if you didn't have to go all the way down into the loop just to switch to the orange line to head to midway, for example? From where I live it is the exact same time estimate to take the trains to Midway as it is to take the Western bus alllllll the way to the orange line and then to midway. That's pretty pathetic. Train service should be able to provide a better route than a street bus.
In fact, that circle line I'm envisioning could start at the red line way up in edgewater, and cut west up near Devon or near Foster, then start curving down. Damn, just imagine all the areas of the city we could reach in one fell swoop...!
I think the ideas for circle lines make a lot more sense if you've spent any time commuting on paris' metro. It may seem silly now but damn are they ever useful!
ok here me out... we dead end roosevelt, merch mart, & clinton, ...then we turn the loop into rings of conveyor belts that get incrementally quicker towards the center... a venerable pedestrian superhighway... a new sport, stationary roller-derby would be born, everyone would show up to work with crazy hair (except for the lucky bald gents), loop architecture walking tours, without walking, morning joggers running faster than humanly possible...
in all seriousness, i'm all for any commuter improvement, i'd be up for a line along the lake to eliminate the need for LSD express buses, third tracks on the blue and orange lines, to provide skip stop and airport express service, and of course a circle line that creates new nodes for businesses and communities, and may alleviate the stress and strain on other parts of the system. Personally, I think a third rail, which is probably next to impossible and a line that runs straight down western or kedzie would be the best options... but there are people that do this for a living... like LiG... actually, what's happened to Living in Gin? Hope you are doing well
...now i'm envisioning the conveyor belt idea like a high speed baggage claim, or better yet, mail sorting conveyor... CTA pass via RFID implant in the neck... get to your stop and the conveyor within the conveyor tosses you onto a slide... weee!
This makes me think it would be a good idea to have an Octopus Card like system for the CTA. We are close to having it with the Chicago Card already, all we need now are scanners at the exits and we could track both where people get on the system and where they get off. I'd be very interested to see how many passengers, for example, get on at the armitage brown line stop, but ultimately exit at the Kedzie orange line stop. If there really is a huge number of people making such trips, on a twice daily basis, it would help convince me of the need of a circle line more.
Manta, the proposed blue line extension doesnt add to the already transit heavy West Side, which has the green line as well as 2 blue lines. It would just push the line further west where I would argue the people would have better access to jobs. Theres not a lot of finance jobs in the Loop for them. Additiionally, take a look at this map. There used to be a suburban line right where they are proposing called the "Westchester Line".
Ahh thanks! That is interesting. What happened with all those stops up and beyond evanston? was there a big push to consolidate at some time in the past?
I wonder how all those T intersections on the old green line worked.
I think whats amazing is this map has a circle line and a logan square line. We've torn down a whole lot of tracks! But we did also build the Orange line to Midway in the 90s so that was a plus.
Yeah seriously. 1938 isn't even that old, it isn't like this is an original map from 1901 . Curious that the old version of the circle looped west instead of east and only connected a couple lines.
Are trams or street cars a good idea now? The map shows a lot of street car lines. I wonder what the cost would be. Most cities that have them happen to have a high rate of use for the other transit systems they feed. Would they have the same social stigma that buses have?
Just because one does not know who one of the most important architects of the 20th century is, this does not excuse the wholesale waste of hundreds of thousands of square feet of perfectly adaptable buildings. In fact most new buildings are built of far inferior materials and construction techniques and would be far-outlived by the MRH buildings.
In addition to the architectural loss of these buildings, the city is losing the embodied energy of these existing buildings to maybe be replaced with new structures someday. No matter how green a replacement buildings may be, it will never compensate for the loss of energy that went into constructing the previous building.
With this heavy-handed move, I think the City is showing their true colors, and they are not “green.”
Come on, does anyone really think Chicago's "green"? One flight through the Denver airport puts us to such shame... all "trash" bins in the Denver airport are partitioned into seperate recycling efforts. Meanwhile, Chicago STILL doesn't even PROVIDE recycling service to most of its citizens, let alone at O'Hare. Pathetic!
On the subject of the CTA -- did anyone else catch the great history of the CTA exhibit up at the libraries this summer? There were some great lines torn down, that we now need. Logan Square line idea is awesome. They've also taken out a ton of the Green Line stops through the west side, when they renovated the stations (in the... 80s I believe?) The west side is not as well-served as it looks from the map, Jack -- if you put a little circle of walking radius around each station I bet you'd hit a lot fewer people than, say, the brown line, red line, or blue line.
Come on, does anyone really think Chicago's "green"? One flight through the Denver airport puts us to such shame... all "trash" bins in the Denver airport are partitioned into seperate recycling efforts. Meanwhile, Chicago STILL doesn't even PROVIDE recycling service to most of its citizens, let alone at O'Hare. Pathetic!
On the subject of the CTA -- did anyone else catch the great history of the CTA exhibit up at the libraries this summer? There were some great lines torn down, that we now need. Logan Square line idea is awesome. They've also taken out a ton of the Green Line stops through the west side, when they renovated the stations (in the... 80s I believe?) The west side is not as well-served as it looks from the map, Jack -- if you put a little circle of walking radius around each station I bet you'd hit a lot fewer people than, say, the brown line, red line, or blue line.
He forgot to mention in this one, however, the fact that for YEARS after they DID decide to name the lines after colors, they continued to put up signage on each line with SEEMINGLY RANDOM COLOR BACKGROUNDS! Leading me, when I first moved here, to constantly believe that Paulina was a stop on the red line, Southport on the Green line, and so on and so forth. I'd love to know what the reasoning behind that asinine idea was.
Congress is the historical east/west divide of the downtown area even if now its more part of the South Loop. But a new lighting scheme could be what it needs to recognized as the prominent street it is. Most Chicagoans think of it as the on ramp to the Eisenhower.
They're gonna make the hollowed out ground floor of the Auditorium look like an FTD florist shop from 1976. Nice!
Why not restore the building with the old bar and figure out what to do with the circulation/sidewalk.How about a bridge looking back at the building?
Or cutting down the traffic and making the drivers look at the Architecture.
But spare me this expensive kitschy crap that probably costs $10 million or more and will be thrown away in 10 years. Do something sustainable. Rebuild the old bar with the money.
This is the major street to the circle interchange. Every single person pretty much comes through here by car. Id like to see the bar reopened to but the city has to meet basic logistical standards. Yes the scheme is a bit kitschy, especially the painted metal trellis things. It certainly will do a lot to soften congress as a mental "edge" to the Loop. Hopefully this leads to further crossings over of people into the south loop. As it is now it seems that besides students, congress is like great wall of China almost.
I always just order them from the Book Cellar. Same price as amazon, gets here in 2 days, and not only do I support my community but when I spend $200 I get $20 to spend. Plus I can drink wine while perusing my book. Amazon can suck it.
If you're asking about good USED arch books, though, that's a different story... to be honest I have yet to find a single decent source in this town... seems like there might be so many of us "thinning the shelves" every week that there's never anything good left when I poke around.
That's paying $5 for a PR session for someone else. What are you really going to learn there?
There's an opening tonite for some artists and graphic designers at the same time. At least there are potential clients and it's FREE. Heavy hitters will be there.
The thing on aluminum structures later in the months sounds fascinating. It costs money but they're offering something.
Aggregate Chicago
I'm sorry Jack, I hate to nitpick this, but I just don't get the same numbers as you, and when you're talking about transit distance, I think it is important. I'm looking directly at google maps, it is clearly 18-20 miles to Elmhurst, Lombard is a little further, Westchester a little closer. When I punch in Wrigley to the loop, I get 5.2 miles going down Clark.
Those western suburban lines better bring in some serious loads of people as you are describing, since they are going to be bringing them 3 to 4 times as far of a distance.
Synergy - the middle of Elmhurst to the middle of the Loop is 16 miles. To York and Roosevelt in South Elmhurst where the line would run to the circle interchange is 11 miles.
Lletdown the westside is already connected to the Loop via the Blue Line A and B trains the B being the new Pink line. It has doen nothing to help the residents or businesses. They are only connected to the Loop essentially and have little to no access to the suburban job centers. The inner city is well served by north/ south and east / west bus lines.
The problem is as you state the CTA stands for the Chicago Transit Authority. Take out the "C" and add an "R" and we could have a truely regional transit system, then you will see some real change.
I did a mapquest and your right its 16 miles. Ive driven it for 20 years I thought it was 12 or so. I guess we should just pack it up and shelve it then.
Jack... obviously transit is not the silver bullet, there are other policies that need to be looked at, and other investments required to bring back those neighborhoods. However, transit is absolutely central to any neighborhood rebuilding itself.
Id also really, really disagree that the El lines do nothing to help their residents. Areas immedietely surrounding El platforms are almost ALWAYS better developed than areas only 2 blocks from a platform.
There already is an RTA by the way.
Ha, naw it is fine. It is just that when numbers start flying around, I like to make sure we atleast roughly agree on the basic facts.
As for the near west side, I think I can agree with your point. really I'm not sure how the circle line will impact things. It seems like it would be nice to be able circumvent going through the through the loop when you want to get from a location on the brown line to a location on the green or orange, but really it doesn't seem like a major demand to me. Is there really any sort of arterial demand of people making such a trip on a daily basis?
Would the west side be better served by a new line running a straight shot, roughly splitting between the north legs of the blue and green lines, sort of running along grand ave? Obviously new lines are incredible expensive, but in terms of the logic, would this make more sense?
Suburban transit lines never do well unless the suburbs were developed around transit. It's like when exurban development puts in bicycle paths on county highways with speed limits off 55 mph and wonders why it hasn't solved any quality-of-life issues.
That being said, find an area of Chicago with enough open real estate to run another rail line without the cost of the project skyrocketing into the hundred of millions of dollars due to property acquisition.
I'd save the money on that and the billions of dollars of money the DOT has spent on interstate lane widening to redevelop a neighborhood like Bridgeport, Canaryville or Kenwood.
Because the only way you're going to be able to add more trains and bring up the density to support more business and more transit is by wiping away parts of these cities clean.
Orochi the near west suburbs are already laid out around Metra Train lines however there are gaps, such as the Roosevelt Road Corridor. This is not a typical suburban area like found around most cities. Its very dense, very job rich, very well served already by transit but could be further improved. My stand is build them both.
Both meaning the circle line and the blue line extension.
I think this discussion is good the CTA is a complex beast. Let me make a few points, the RTA is an umbrella organization that covers Pace Metra and CTA. It might be efficient to merge all three into one agency, problem is the suburbs might have the most clout so this has been resisted by the Royal family of Chicago.
The subways we have with the exception of a small stretch on the blue line are not cost effective and will not pay for themselves. The cost of tunneling in Chicago is much higher than in other metro areas due to the soft clay and high watter table. Geology has helped in determining that Chicago will have and EL. The WPA subways were jobs creating projects.
Just wanted to throw that in the mix.
here is the preferred scheme for the circle line.... looks like the line will not actually connect to the north west blue line and north brown/red lines.
Link
But thats the most critical part.
i dont know if its the most critical, but its certainly the part i was most excited about...
But that's the whole point, Jack : these areas (and everyone's forgetting the South Side, which has historically been hugely developed and only now is full of empty land) are OPEN space within city limits that need to be encouraged to grow more densely. Part of the reason that nobody lives (or works) there is that there is no transit there. I see where you're coming from with wanting more suburban service, but the fact is that we have to develop the density in a tighter area first -- this is not only an urban economic priority but a greater ecological priority as well.
Re : the circle lines -- yes the current proposals are ass-backwards, in my opinion. If you're going to put in a circle line, it needs to connect the blue and brown lines and pick up the west side, then curve around to serve pilsen / bridgeport and end at green line. The Western Ave. corridor would be the perfect place to start, or further west to Kimball even, then cutting back in to run east somewhere near Cermak, perhaps. Or further south. That's an idea, at least.
Synergy, I think you're underestimating the amount of people that need to get from north to near west or south side but not over near the lake. I take this commute frequently and have been very suprised at the number of people taking the long haul with me. Part of your problem with the loop el (which I agree with) would be alleviated if we didn't all have to be routed through the loop. I imagine we're probably all northsiders here -- imagine if you didn't have to go all the way down into the loop just to switch to the orange line to head to midway, for example? From where I live it is the exact same time estimate to take the trains to Midway as it is to take the Western bus alllllll the way to the orange line and then to midway. That's pretty pathetic. Train service should be able to provide a better route than a street bus.
In fact, that circle line I'm envisioning could start at the red line way up in edgewater, and cut west up near Devon or near Foster, then start curving down. Damn, just imagine all the areas of the city we could reach in one fell swoop...!
I think the ideas for circle lines make a lot more sense if you've spent any time commuting on paris' metro. It may seem silly now but damn are they ever useful!
ok here me out... we dead end roosevelt, merch mart, & clinton, ...then we turn the loop into rings of conveyor belts that get incrementally quicker towards the center... a venerable pedestrian superhighway... a new sport, stationary roller-derby would be born, everyone would show up to work with crazy hair (except for the lucky bald gents), loop architecture walking tours, without walking, morning joggers running faster than humanly possible...
in all seriousness, i'm all for any commuter improvement, i'd be up for a line along the lake to eliminate the need for LSD express buses, third tracks on the blue and orange lines, to provide skip stop and airport express service, and of course a circle line that creates new nodes for businesses and communities, and may alleviate the stress and strain on other parts of the system. Personally, I think a third rail, which is probably next to impossible and a line that runs straight down western or kedzie would be the best options... but there are people that do this for a living... like LiG... actually, what's happened to Living in Gin? Hope you are doing well
...now i'm envisioning the conveyor belt idea like a high speed baggage claim, or better yet, mail sorting conveyor... CTA pass via RFID implant in the neck... get to your stop and the conveyor within the conveyor tosses you onto a slide... weee!
This makes me think it would be a good idea to have an Octopus Card like system for the CTA. We are close to having it with the Chicago Card already, all we need now are scanners at the exits and we could track both where people get on the system and where they get off. I'd be very interested to see how many passengers, for example, get on at the armitage brown line stop, but ultimately exit at the Kedzie orange line stop. If there really is a huge number of people making such trips, on a twice daily basis, it would help convince me of the need of a circle line more.
Manta, the proposed blue line extension doesnt add to the already transit heavy West Side, which has the green line as well as 2 blue lines. It would just push the line further west where I would argue the people would have better access to jobs. Theres not a lot of finance jobs in the Loop for them. Additiionally, take a look at this map. There used to be a suburban line right where they are proposing called the "Westchester Line".
link
Jack, I can't get those links to work. Anyone else have any luck?
the cta server wont allow inbound links - cut and paste it into the browser
Ahh thanks! That is interesting. What happened with all those stops up and beyond evanston? was there a big push to consolidate at some time in the past?
I wonder how all those T intersections on the old green line worked.
I think whats amazing is this map has a circle line and a logan square line. We've torn down a whole lot of tracks! But we did also build the Orange line to Midway in the 90s so that was a plus.
Yeah seriously. 1938 isn't even that old, it isn't like this is an original map from 1901 . Curious that the old version of the circle looped west instead of east and only connected a couple lines.
Are trams or street cars a good idea now? The map shows a lot of street car lines. I wonder what the cost would be. Most cities that have them happen to have a high rate of use for the other transit systems they feed. Would they have the same social stigma that buses have?
There seems to be a flair up over at Blair Kamin's blog over the Gropius ( maybe gropius ) demolition site
[url=http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/theskyline/2009/10/chicago-lets-its-savage-side-show-first-gropius-building-demolished-at-michael-reese-.html#comment-captcha
]link[/url]
From Jack's post. One of the commenters:
Just because one does not know who one of the most important architects of the 20th century is, this does not excuse the wholesale waste of hundreds of thousands of square feet of perfectly adaptable buildings. In fact most new buildings are built of far inferior materials and construction techniques and would be far-outlived by the MRH buildings.
In addition to the architectural loss of these buildings, the city is losing the embodied energy of these existing buildings to maybe be replaced with new structures someday. No matter how green a replacement buildings may be, it will never compensate for the loss of energy that went into constructing the previous building.
With this heavy-handed move, I think the City is showing their true colors, and they are not “green.”
Well put.
Come on, does anyone really think Chicago's "green"? One flight through the Denver airport puts us to such shame... all "trash" bins in the Denver airport are partitioned into seperate recycling efforts. Meanwhile, Chicago STILL doesn't even PROVIDE recycling service to most of its citizens, let alone at O'Hare. Pathetic!
On the subject of the CTA -- did anyone else catch the great history of the CTA exhibit up at the libraries this summer? There were some great lines torn down, that we now need. Logan Square line idea is awesome. They've also taken out a ton of the Green Line stops through the west side, when they renovated the stations (in the... 80s I believe?) The west side is not as well-served as it looks from the map, Jack -- if you put a little circle of walking radius around each station I bet you'd hit a lot fewer people than, say, the brown line, red line, or blue line.
Come on, does anyone really think Chicago's "green"? One flight through the Denver airport puts us to such shame... all "trash" bins in the Denver airport are partitioned into seperate recycling efforts. Meanwhile, Chicago STILL doesn't even PROVIDE recycling service to most of its citizens, let alone at O'Hare. Pathetic!
On the subject of the CTA -- did anyone else catch the great history of the CTA exhibit up at the libraries this summer? There were some great lines torn down, that we now need. Logan Square line idea is awesome. They've also taken out a ton of the Green Line stops through the west side, when they renovated the stations (in the... 80s I believe?) The west side is not as well-served as it looks from the map, Jack -- if you put a little circle of walking radius around each station I bet you'd hit a lot fewer people than, say, the brown line, red line, or blue line.
Wow - amazing look at the years of CTA thought process. I think it explains a lot.
link
I think a good question is... what the hell happened to Lake Calumet?
I think a good question is... what the hell happened to Lake Calumet?
It seems it has been progressively chopped up and filled in, primarily by the steel industry.
Lake Calumet
Oh I do so love Cecil's Chicago Straight Dopes.
He forgot to mention in this one, however, the fact that for YEARS after they DID decide to name the lines after colors, they continued to put up signage on each line with SEEMINGLY RANDOM COLOR BACKGROUNDS! Leading me, when I first moved here, to constantly believe that Paulina was a stop on the red line, Southport on the Green line, and so on and so forth. I'd love to know what the reasoning behind that asinine idea was.
The different colors on the signs were for A and B stops originally.
link
Congress is the historical east/west divide of the downtown area even if now its more part of the South Loop. But a new lighting scheme could be what it needs to recognized as the prominent street it is. Most Chicagoans think of it as the on ramp to the Eisenhower.
They're gonna make the hollowed out ground floor of the Auditorium look like an FTD florist shop from 1976. Nice!
Why not restore the building with the old bar and figure out what to do with the circulation/sidewalk.How about a bridge looking back at the building?
Or cutting down the traffic and making the drivers look at the Architecture.
But spare me this expensive kitschy crap that probably costs $10 million or more and will be thrown away in 10 years. Do something sustainable. Rebuild the old bar with the money.
This is the major street to the circle interchange. Every single person pretty much comes through here by car. Id like to see the bar reopened to but the city has to meet basic logistical standards. Yes the scheme is a bit kitschy, especially the painted metal trellis things. It certainly will do a lot to soften congress as a mental "edge" to the Loop. Hopefully this leads to further crossings over of people into the south loop. As it is now it seems that besides students, congress is like great wall of China almost.
Congress, Western, Ashland, Irving Park, Stony Island....
They all are highways in the middle of the city.
Run Congress underground from east of Michigan to just west of State and make it Roosevelt's quad.
Put the bar back in and you have something that's people-friendly and will fill with activity from the schools and the youth hostel.
Restore the Auditorium Bldg to its original configuration.
i am so drunk right now. i wanted to put this as a placeholder as a future comment.
Be careful drunk posting Orochi - how long can you get away with it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSP1EPfXxsQ&feature=related
that was HORRIBLE
lol
Now that the Prairie Avenue book store is closed, where is the best book store to buy Architecture books?
My vote is Quimbys on North Ave for new and interesting stuff
And Myopic for there huge pile of used books.
amazon.com has always been a favorite
I always just order them from the Book Cellar. Same price as amazon, gets here in 2 days, and not only do I support my community but when I spend $200 I get $20 to spend. Plus I can drink wine while perusing my book. Amazon can suck it.
If you're asking about good USED arch books, though, that's a different story... to be honest I have yet to find a single decent source in this town... seems like there might be so many of us "thinning the shelves" every week that there's never anything good left when I poke around.
I like the bookstore in Seattle or Bill Stout in SF
http://www.stoutbooks.com/cgi-bin/stoutbooks.cgi/index.html
Theres a $5.00 cover to hear a panel discuss the Burnham Plan and the future at Shuba's
http://arcchicago.blogspot.com/
The Lynn Becker link also offered this link to a fascinating article on all those buildings around the city that say Schlitz on them. Its a good read.
http://forgottenchicago.com/features/chicago-architecture/tied-houses/
anyone heading to the "smackdown" tonight?
http://www.urbanhabitatchicago.org/events/lectures/364/
That's paying $5 for a PR session for someone else. What are you really going to learn there?
There's an opening tonite for some artists and graphic designers at the same time. At least there are potential clients and it's FREE. Heavy hitters will be there.
The thing on aluminum structures later in the months sounds fascinating. It costs money but they're offering something.
Just my take...
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