So Chicago’s local PBS network has some great documentaries on the city for free on YouTube from the late 2000s and 2010s
Okay so Chicago is an amazing city, we all love her right. Well here's the thing, the Chicago we all love did not exist 25 years ago. This was the Chicago of the 1970s
The riverfront was neglected and the much of the lakefront was inaccessible covered by a rail yard and parking lots .
Chicago has had some of the most successful Urban projects of the century happen in its downtown. And their gorgeous too. More impressive is the fact that they gave the city more open space and made it more livable for citizens. I am of course referring to 3 park projects, the Chicago River Walk, Millennium park and Daley Park, and the conversion of Meigs Field.
First Up let's look at the conversion of Meigs Field into a park, it was an artifical island built for a the century of progress exposition that was converted to an airfield following the exposition. In 2004 due to political corruption mostly it was converted into a park when Mayor Daley ordered construction crews to demolish the airstrip due to his dislike of the noise the air field made. It was turned into a more natural setting and left to nature, to slowly erode back into the lake, here it is below
Next up is the Chicago Riverwalk which began construction in phases in 2001 with phase 1 ending construction in 2005. It began as part of a project to reconfigure wacker drive and to make the river a more inviting place. It expanded the walking space by the river, added new shops and greenery to the space. The initial phase of the Riverwalk was split into 4 distinct segments, called Confluence, Arcade, Civic and Market.
Finally we have Millennium Park.
Millennium Park was built as an expansion of the existing Grant Park Northwards, covering up Parking lots and a rail yard on the lake shore as was shown at the start of the post. Millennium Park began construction in 1997 and opened in July of 2004 with many of the delays attributed to political corruption, poor planning, and bad contractors that raised the coat of construction from 150 million dollars to 475 million dollars, bit like many things, people don't care about how much is cost to build because it is now an incredibly popular public amenity. Also it gave us the bean, so aren't we all happy. It is also the world's largest green roof.
The construction of Millennium Park also included the reconstruction of Millennium Station which services the South Shore Line and several Metra lines such as the Metra Electric
I think that the lesson to be learned from this is that Chicago is the best city in the US I mean that we should work to improve our cities and try to redesign things that aren't good for our cities to be better because cities are living and changing organisms and we should fight for positive change
I love boston but chicago is the only place I have ever been where I truly felt like if I dug deep enough under the city I would find organs
I feel like that's true for most of Chicago, but the reasoning for the placement of the Organs in the dirt varies heavily based on neighborhood
Oh yeah, @chicago-mentioned
Anyways I am doing my due diligence in my research of this
If you want to learn more about this topic I recommend this curbed article on the history of Grant Park
And this youtube video on these same parks and 2 others
I'm just going to post the video archives of AIDs Protests that I can find because I think that seeing the people fighting for their lives helps people to realize how recent it was and how it still affects them to this day
Trains should scream more, it reminds us of our mortality and the hubris of humanity
Like this but louder
I'm just going to post the video archives of AIDs Protests that I can find because I think that seeing the people fighting for their lives helps people to realize how recent it was and how it still affects them to this day
I’m just going to post the video archives of AIDs Protests that I can find because I think that seeing the people fighting for their lives helps people to realize how recent it was and how it still affects them to this day
Women, fish, creatures of the night, fools, all ye, gather round as I tell you the tale of the most evil man in the history of the state of New York. Robert Moses, the president of the 1964 New York World's Fair and New York City parks commissioner between 1934 and 1960
Our tale begins in the early 1900s where after our despicable little man earned his BAs from Oxford and Yale and a PHD in Political Science from Columbia, 3 colleges known for evil graduates, he became a close friend of New York governor Al Smith by attracting his attention through his plans to simplify and consolidate the new york state government. By the late 1920s he was appointed the Secretary of State and after reforming the New York state government to remove inefficiencies, he began to work on public works projects which required the creation of new political offices which coincidentally he was put in charge of such as the Long Island State Park Commission and the State Council of Parks. Here is where is influence began to become renowned as he designed the first car centric beach with the Jones Beach State Park
This was of course before his entire career would change with the beginning of New Deal and his legacy would go from a public servant and a reformer to that of a bigoted control freak who ran highways through minority neighborhoods.
During the New Deal Era, the federal government gave millions of dollars to states and cities to build infrastructure to get people back to work via the WPA and CCC. The issue was most cities and states did not have shovel ready projects, but guess who did have shovel ready projects. One very famous little bastard boy from New York had many shovel ready projects. A few were good like public swimming pools, but his most famous project of the New Deal would be the Triborough Bridge
Now a simple bridge may not seem it would be one of the most important parts of the legacy of such a famous man as Robert Moses, but the thing is, Robert Advocated for a system of highways and roads to feed into the bridge and that alongside the 2 facts that he was obsessed with automobiles and had previously built highways on Long Island such as the Meadowbrook State Highway, set the stage for the numerous highways he would build, something made easier by how he used the funds from the tolls on projects he ran such as the Triborough Bridge to build other projects of his.
After the New Deal and the second World War, Robert Moses would enter the height of his power as New York Mayor LaGuardia resigned he came into almost unparalleled power by simultaneously holding numerous unelected positions in the New York City Government such as Commissioner of the New York City Planning Commission, and the Parks Commissioner. As the federal government started to push for Freeways, Moses Delivered despite not knowing how to drive, by creating projects such as the Brooklyn Queens Expressway which displaced thousands and destroyed hundreds of blocks
He also designed other highways in New York such as the Staten Island Expressway, and the Cross Bronx Expressway
His Freeway obsession didn’t stop at the outer boroughs however as he almost managed to demolish Soho, the Greenwich Village, Alphabet City and Little Italy for I-78 to run across Manhattan with the Infamous Lower Manhattan Expressway which was stopped by Anti Freeway Protests led by Jane Jacob’s considered to be the startingpoint of New Urbanism.
But Moses didn’t stop at Freeways, he also made sure to demolish massive sections of City for other purposes too
So I may have just heard of the worst urbanism takes put there,
"It was clear to me that to make a place friendly to cycling, it was more important to restrict cars than it was to build a bunch of expensive bicycle infrastructure. After all protected bike lanes are really just an extension of car infrastructure right"
who said this. i just want to talk.
Not Just Bikes in his latest Dutch Nationalist piece, he says this at 5:30 in the video
So I may have just heard of the worst urbanism takes put there,
"It was clear to me that to make a place friendly to cycling, it was more important to restrict cars than it was to build a bunch of expensive bicycle infrastructure. After all protected bike lanes are really just an extension of car infrastructure right"
First of all Bicycle infrastructure is far cheaper than car infrastructure to build, secondly Protected bike lanes are not car infrastructure, they are anti car infrastructure. They remove space from cars. This is on a video about rhe Netherlands, you should know that. Plus do you think the Netherlands got to be cycling friendly purely through traffic calming measure, no. It got there through the big infrastructure projects that you praise when talking about if they happened in the past, but complain about the cost of making if they are new. This is one of the most maddening takes I have heard in a while
And here is the source, a video which quite literally states that there are no problems with the Netherlands from the largest Dutch Nationalist a fucking Canadian.
