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Originally Posted by ardecila
I dunno if the people on Delaware would appreciate that. More realistic is linking Walton through to LaSalle... the building in the way (Dryer Hall) has already been shuttered by Moody and no doubt it will be torn down by whoever buys the land. |
Pushing Walton through to LaSalle seems like a dumb idea. It's a very short block to Oak. Connecting Locust to Delaware is a much more useful thing and I don't think any complainers on Delaware would have a leg to stand on. It's still a long way from an ideal setup for through traffic so it wouldn't attract too much, but it would be useful enough to take some pressure off Oak and Chicago as the area north of the Rowhouses fills in, while not being excessively disruptive to traffic flow on LaSalle.
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Originally Posted by BuildThemTaller
Ah yes, let us not blame the religious organization for turning its back on the most in need. Good call. Even if that was a good position in the 1980's, they have continued to shun their neighbors for the last 20 years after Cabrini Green was torn down and its residents dispersed. Instead of renovating their facilities or opening their doors to their neighbors with their more recent buildings, they have remained insular, isolating themselves behind thick brick walls and parking garages like they were some commuter campus for people living far away. But I am not a Christian, so what do I know?
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Most colleges and universities aren't particularly integrated into their communities, especially when they're as small as Moody is. Even larger ones are often insular - Yale gets a lot of flack for not being more involved with its surroundings, although they've started to do more than they used to. Moody is also first and foremost a college. It's not a church, and even though Moody Church shares the name of the same person, they are completely distinct organizations with no legal or denomination affiliation. So it's mission is to educate it's students, not to provide support to it's neighbors.
That said, students there are *required* to participate in weekly outreach programs. My understanding is that they are mostly free to choose to volunteer their time at almost any existing outreach, mission, or social service organization in the City, so they go all over the city to do that work, not just the Near North Side. I'm sure some students do volunteer locally in the neighborhood, but there are more than enough agencies in the city that needed help that their impact is not necessarily easily accounted into some convenient measure of what they accomplish. They're also mostly undergraduates, so there's only so much value they're going to add at any given place.
You should probably also realize that even though they're not a commuter campus (undergraduates are required to stay in college controlled housing), they do run a rather large correspondence school from that campus, so there is a lot if work being done that isn't visible because it's done remotely. Asking a correspondence school to be more involved with their neighbors is kind of silly.
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Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright
Building a wall to keep the scary black people out is not "urban renewal" and is absolutely unchristian.
That said most urban renewal projects were soaked in racism and other archaic ideas.
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The oldest parts of Moody's campus were built before the Cabrini rowhouses, and the Cabrini rowhouses weren't majority black when they were first constructed. Their campus may have accumulated some land due to "urban renewal," and Moody didn't fight against it (why would they? it was conventional wisdom that it would benefit residents when it was built - and the Rowhouses likely did benefit the original white occupants) but they weren't the driving force causing it.
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Originally Posted by Skyguy_7
Easy on the phobia. Imagine if you directed that hate towards a different religious group. You wouldn’t be too proud of yourself. The Moody campus wasn’t built to keep Cabrini people separated from neighborhoods to the east. What an absurd implication.
I was recently at a pre-construction walk through there and Moody representatives welcomed contractors, of all ethnicities, by starting the meeting in prayer. It was refreshing. I can tell you they’re good people.
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Officially both by policy and by stated theology, Moody is against racism. In practice, it has at times struggled with perfectly implementing practices that are tolerant and supportive of diversity. And moreso than just any place is imperfect in that regard. Separating race, culture, and religion seem to especially create challenges for the school administrators. Based on what I've heard from people affiliated with Moody, the school wants to be open and inclusive, it's just mostly run and populated by people who are either from very white areas, it whose experience with diversity is as missionaries in situations where things often end up being run like the "white man is here to save you" both in the religious sense and the technological and economic development sense.
So, yes, most of the people at Moody have kindness in their hearts and want to do the right thing. But they're operating from a cultural disadvantage much of the time.
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