... and immediately after the giant structure in the background was erected.


Well holy cow, nice find.

(pun not intended ;) )

Shit, I go out of town for a week and come back to find that Addison/Sheffield is a pile of ruble. I figured that the scaffolding was for a rooftop deck installation. Better be a damn good replacement.


There is something else that has been bugging me since I got back. I spent two days in LA for the first time, and forumers Chris LA and King of the Hill offered to drive me around last Monday to cover more ground. My biggest surprise is that strip malls in LA appear to be the exception, not the rule; and some of the strip malls are even two levels, and I saw at least one with underground parking. I would even wager that Chicago has just as many if not more strip malls than a city whom is vastly more auto-centric. I didn't visit the valley, but I did cover East LA, Santa Monica, Downtown, Koreatown, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Lemiert Park, Angelino Hieghts and Echo Park, and the vast majority of retail comes up to the street. Why do we continue allow this single-story, surface-lot laden substandard strip mall shit to be built here, in a city that has traditionally more pre-war urban fabric and better transit system?

That looks like it was taken from the El platform.

LA has higher population density, much higher land values, and some semblance of land use planning.

Having spent a fair amount of time in LA, I'm not sure I agree with this. It is true that most retail in central, walkable areas of LA abuts the street. However, if you follow any of the main boulevards out of those central areas (even just a mile or so), strip malls tend to be ubiquitous. I do think LA gets a bad rap for this, though, especially considering the amount of strip malls built in far flung and suburban areas of other cities (Chicago included). And I agree that Chicago allows way too much of this crap to get constructed.

The main difference in terms of experience, I think, is the decentralized nature of LA as compared to north-eastern cities (and Chicago). In Chicago, it is quite easy to stay in transit-centric areas of the city and never encounter car-centric developments on a day to day basis: the city is quite centralized (or lake-centric, if you prefer). Whether you encounter the car-centric development is very much a factor of where you live and work in the city. In LA, there are a lot of mini-city centers, which require you to drive between them, forcing you to see much more of the car-centric development of the city on a day to day basis.

One thing I never got used to there was the idea that great restaurants could exist in a strip mall. In Chicago, there are a handful of restaurants in strip malls I would ever go to. In LA, it seems like every other restaurant I'd go to was in a strip mall. You've got to change your mindset a bit. There is some great food in those strip malls, though.

Taft

Wait, what? As of 2006, L.A.'s population density was 8,205/sq mi (3,168/km2). Chicago's in 2007 was 12,649/sq mi (4,816/km2).

^I think he was referring to metro area population densities:

Chicago Metropolitan Area: 1,318/sq mi (509/km²)
Greater Los Angeles Area: 2,665/sq. mi. (1,029/km²)

Perhaps my thinking was slightly biased because I know of all the locations where this strip mall garbage has polluted our urban fabric and was comparing it to what saw in LA. However, I did cover a lot of ground and I saw street after street of retial at the sidewalk. The majority of stripmalls I did see were very small. And we also have major strip malls one mile from our downtown too, such as Roosevelt/ Canal, Division/ Clybourn and North/ Clybourn. Although development as of late has been beter in these locations, we still have more strip malls being constructed, I know of at least two that went to plan commision this year which were large enough to require a PD. Yes I know many of these have replaced vacated industrial land, but we need to demand better. I still am bewildered that Gateway Center was allowed to be constructed right next door to one of CTA's busiest transfer points, while Evanston allows for a 17 story TOD project across the street.

Some good news,
It looks like Columbia is starting construction on the Studio Gang designed film school. Steel piles were delivered to the site this morning.

^ As MrD, alludes to, there's nothing quite as effective as sky-high land values in ensuring dense development, even when predominantly auto-oriented. Chicago historically has had pretty low land values in most locations, certainly relative to Los Angeles. The higher the land value, the higher the development pressure, and the higher the development pressure, the greater the leverage government has to demand certain forms of development.

In this regard, Evanston was largely successful at using the wild boom years of 2002-2007 to enforce very urban forms in its development. Chicago's results are, at best, a mixed bag. On the plus side, the zoning rewrite ensured commercial development to the lot lines in all but a few commercial zoning districts, saving the lakefront neighborhoods from future stripmall blight. On the downside, the zoning rewrite has also largely resulted in almost every development of any size greater than 1 lot being a Planned Development, meaning any and every land use regulation can get thrown out the window through a largely political process. And further, the complete lack of actual demand in our poor areas (with any remaining value in the land being purely speculative) means that whatever restrictions are in place on development will on the margin be just one more impediment of anyone actually developing anything. Mandating commercial buildings be built to the lot lines in the still-emptying ghettos is at best pointless and at worst counterproductive. But how to make the land valuable and desirable to create development pressure?

^^^^Yeah Gateway is a wreck....it is blight...it should be torn down and started over from scratch

Some photos of Sports Corner being demolished: [1] [2] [3] [4]
:hell:

Damn.

Can one refresh my memory of what is taking it's place.

Thanks in advance.

The good thing is that this could actually happen since its so low density. Strip malls are prime targets for future redevelopment!

man, I wish I cared about sportscorner being gone, but the building was a dump. I like the building next door much more anyway. the one with bacci in it

Every big city is building strip malls, you guys are too hard on your city.

In the past several years I've seen tons of multilevel development with streetfront retail go up in Chicago (even if the spaces remain empty). Despite the occasional strip mall, it mostly seems to me that Chicago's "urban" footprint has been expanding, not eroding.

Nortown Terrace
 

I noticed the other day that a sales center for the Nortown Terrace development on the site of the Nortown Theater is open on Devon. They also have a website up. No full renderings, but I think it's interesting that the new building seems to imitate the massing of the old, and that movie theatres are still in the mix, apparently. Architecture by VOA, but still pretty boring looking. I'm surprised this project is moving forward. They had some better images at the office.

http://nortownterrace.com/index.htm

7 stories? Nice density

Great, I grew up in this area. From the pic I only counted 5 or maybe 6 stories, but as TUP noted the website lists 7 levels

Are the photo and the site incongruous or am I just blind?

I think the problem there is what's across the river: an unsightly, brightly-lit train yard that's not going anywhere. And beyond that, the forgotten bowels of the South Loop/West Loop. Probably the ugliest landscape anywhere near downtown. I'd want to turn my back to that too.

What would the reasoning be for restoring the old kink in the river? Wouldn't it make a good chunk of the Riverside Park land disappear and only create useless and inaccessible land next to the train yard on the west bank?

From the curve on the river, buildings could visually surround you in a way that they can't do on a razor-straight course. This in turn creates an outdoor "room" and a sense of enclosure.

Or, what if the original course of the river was restored as a Venetian-scale canal, with the main channel remaining? This would create an island on which to do some interesting things.