^ if you visit chinatown in san francisco or new york or toronto or london, they are fully integrated into the urban fabric of their cities. you can just be stumbling about toronto and accidentally come across their chinatown. it's just woven seamlessly into the urban core of the city. ditto for any of those other cities.
in chicago's case, no tourist in the entire history of tourists has ever just stumbled upon chicago's chinatown. you have to want to go to chinatown (and know how to get there) to ever end up there. with the abandoned railroad land to the north, the river and industrial no man's land to the west, the stevenson/dan ryan expressways to the south, and old project land and railroad ROWs on the east, chicago's chinatown absolutely feels cut-off and isolated into its own little world in a way that i've never experienced with any other city's chinatown.
yes, from some vistas wthin chinatown you can see the sears tower rising above in the distance to remind you that you're still in chicago, but if you ever tried to walk from chinatown back to the sears tower, it'd be a long, lonely, boring walk through a lot of no man's land. that's the disconnect i'm talking about.
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"Missing middle" housing can be a marvelous middle ground for many middle class families.
Last edited by Steely Dan; Mar 24, 2015 at 9:24 PM.
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