Just another crime non-statistic

Most crime goes unreported. The reasons remain unexamined.

No one wants to be another statistic, but that's how the police police. Chicago keeps a tally of where crimes are called in, and stations more cops there. Only 2 out of every 5 violent crimes are told to police. But any attempt to prevent crime has to start somewhere. Cops follow where the data leads.

We know most crime is hidden from police because the Census Bureau also keeps statistics. The National Crime Victimization Survey asks a sample of Americans about all the nasty things that might have happened to them in the last six months.

I know. Nasty things have happened to me, and I've been asked. A census field representative showed up at my door pre-Covid. Trump was griping about the census so much that I figured whatever business the census taker had must be good. So we had a thorough discussion about crime. Very thorough.

Has something I carry—luggage, a wallet, purse, briefcase, book—been stolen?

Clothing, jewelry, or cellphone?

Bicycle or sports equipment?

Things in the home like a TV, stereo, or tools?

Things outside my home such as a garden hose or lawn furniture?

Things belonging to children in the household?

Things from a vehicle, such as a package, groceries, camera or CD? Wait, what's a CD?

OK, did anyone attempt to steal anything?

If this doesn't sound like the usual census experience, it isn't. The chatty gent was working on the National Crime Victimization Survey which collects data on trends in violent crime, costs of crime, crime in schools and how law enforcement responds.

Most census visits don't go into this much detail. Still, this long-form interview soft-pedaled one particular fact. A census rep would come back every six months to ask the same questions once again. This is how we learn about crimes beyond the statistics. Someone just keeps asking and asking.

Sign of a good deal

Some thoughts on negotiation need writing down, because that's how agreements work.

Agreements end not with a handshake but a signature.

I learned why early in my writing career. I was taking a new job editing a weekly newspaper, and all that stood between me and my future boss was salary. I wanted him to match what I was paid in my last job. We were apart $5 a week. Newspaper salaries being what they were, this could have been a deal breaker.

"Well," he said, "I'm not going to argue about $5."

I thought he was conceding, and I had won the argument. So I took the job. But when I got my first paycheck, it came short of my expectations—$5 short. Every agreement has its checks and balances, and this check was what counted toward my bank balance.

Since then I've taken many other jobs. I've sat in on union contract talks. I've drafted vendor contracts. I've discussed community agreements with local businesses. Till I see a John Hancock, I'm never sure whether something has been agreed, or only promised.

Polish Triangle: Don't let the pigeon drive the bus

Picture your route to work. Some of it could move more quickly, but in other places you intentionally stop to talk to friends, or pick up something to eat. Or it's not a destination but a point where you reflect on what's ahead.

For me that's the subway stop near my home. Not so much the subway itself—we share the tunnel with quite a few creatures but it's not like visiting the zoo. And not so much the entrance, where the stairway is getting patched checkerboard style with whatever tile's on hand, and when it rains you have to dodge the puddles.

Beyond the Blue Line entrance at Division is a small plaza, which is possibly even less notable. Milwaukee Avenue is the cross street, and in Chicago we love our diagonal intersections. North, Damen and Milwaukee is just up the street, the gateway to Bucktown, and people are all in a hurry to get somewhere and walking every which way, no matter what the traffic signals say. Here, where Division intersects Ashland just a bit short of Milwaukee, there's this triangle-shaped wedge of a plaza that floats in the intersection like a raft. People mostly avoid it, as if it would float away.

The station and its patchwork staircase are due for renovations, so I was describing this place to a Tribune reporter. It's not as welcoming an area as it should be, I said. There's a constant fight against pigeons. I went on at great length, but those 16 words are all that got in the paper. When talking to a reporter, always keep a sound bite handy. This isn't the one I would have chosen.

It's not fake news. The reporter started out the column calling it a gray pigeony place—if pigeony is a word, it's unknown to Google spell check—and the pigeons helped out by posing for the Tribune photographer. So this part of the story has the insistent coo of truth. But my point was to look beyond the subway station and give some love to what has long been called the Polish Triangle.

Planned renovation of Blue Line ‘L’ stops raises hope that a nearby park will be revitalized

Lessons from a neighborhood dairy

The Leona's restaurant at 1938 W. Augusta Blvd. is due to be razed, and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks today recommended that the city allow the demolition.

A staff presentation suggested the 1920s dairy did not fit the East Village district, showing slides of my Victorian block as proof. The building's piecemeal construction also counted against it.

I've lived for 17 years in East Village, but I grew up in Milwaukee, and my grade school was a converted dairy. Like this building, it was built in sections over time. The dairy was actually the school gym: I played basketball there, I had band practice, I tried to learn the foxtrot. It served well as a school, and taught me something about city history.

This building is remarkably similar in structure. It stands as a lesson in Eastern European settlement of the West Town community and the commerce that kept it running. When I go to Leona's I look at the bones of the building and I see more than a restaurant. To my to mind it contributes greatly to the East Village landmark district, and I encouraged the commission (in just these words) to keep it in place.

Our new alderman, Brian Hopkins, also spoke for preserving the building. He'll have another chance in the City Council to defend a local landmark. 🦄

Twisted route to Ashland BRT

Only in Chicago can it be surprising when a municipal hearing involves not only questions from the public, but answers too.

There have been nothing but questions about the CTA's plan to devote two lanes of Ashland Avenue to express buses. Bus-only lanes were on the drawing boards five years ago along Jeffrey Boulevard, Halsted Street and several east-west streets. A Jeffrey route saw daylight last year with a downscaled 2-mile bus lane. But the others seem to have been abandoned – until this summer, when the Halsted plan resurfaced on Ashland to the surprise of long-time community activists. There were public hearings along the way, but with few signs that the public was invited.

We've come to expect town halls to be stage-managed. When the city closed neighborhood schools this summer, asking questions required signing up before entering the hall for 2 minutes of microphone time. The format included a court reporter dutifully recording the testimony, plus steady cross-talk of Spanish translation for parents, but no response. School administrators and the police commander referred the audience to planning documents collated in binders. Shades of Mitt Romney.

I was hoping for more back-and-forth from the stage at the CTA's Dec. 20 Ashland BRT "open house" at the Pulaski Park fieldhouse. This time, no one was on the stage. Instead, two rows of easels displayed slide-show pages summarizing the plan, and CTA staffers and consultants nearby to field questions.

While I had a lot of questions, mostly I got the same answer: Great question! Write it down on this comment form, or the court reporter will take it down. Or, you can look for details in those binders over there.

At least it was an answer. Despite the cue-card format and house-hunters billing, the open house was indeed a public hearing under the project's federally mandated environmental assessment. However the CTA came to consider Ashland Avenue for bus lanes, the agency can't be faulted for rejecting the status quo.

The quickest way to get from one end of Ashland to the other on the CTA is first to take the L downtown. A drive along the route between Cortland and 31st streets raises questions about how the how vehicle traffic would move with two fewer lanes, especially when traffic idles for a delivery truck, a parallel parker, a narrow underpass or a queue of turning cars.

Other options seem to have faced little serious consideration. Logic would dictate that continuation of the status quo would have some effect, good or bad; in fact, the CTA assessment asserts "the inadequacy of the No-Build Alternative to address persistent growth and mobility needs outside of downtown." Yet the study assigns no impact to this alternative.

The CTA "Build Alternative" takes out left-turn lanes to make room for new bus stops at the median. It was chosen from from a half-dozen scenarios identified in 2012. There's little evidence that round of open houses was publicized or open to members of the press, much less the community. Yet any feedback was considered definitive. Even now it is difficult to evaluate what options were considered or why they were rejected.

The final scheme in fact bundles several approaches, from articulated buses to left-turn restrictions to greeen-light signal priority. It's likely that each does not contribute equally to the success of the project, yet there is no opportunity to evaluate each on its own. If funding is limited (and when is it not?) there is no guidance on what priority to assign each element. For instance, signal priority alone might provide the greatest on-time benefits at little cost or disruption.

Impact on side streets is suggested – for instance, although parking is restricted to residents along much of the study area, enough open parking is assumed to absorb a 12% loss of parking along Ashland. There is no traffic study for Noble and Wood streets, the closest local arteries parallel to Ashland, although they are very likely to take on additional traffic. When bike lakes were added a few years ago on Damen Avenue, this relatively simple diverted traffic to Wood and other north-south streets as well as Ashland and Western.

Left-turn wait times at rush hour already are judged as unacceptable at 13 intersections, yet there is no examination of the options available to reconfigure these intersections, or their effect on traffic patterns. Right-turn lanes presumably would face backups comparable what left-turn lanes now encounter, yet parking remains in place in the far lanes, forcing traffic backups in the single forward lane. Backups or increased exhaust emissions are not considered.

Mayor Emanuel launched the plan as building a "world-class transit system" but as concerns spread he appeared to hedge. There's still no money allocated for operation, which the CTA assumes will cost no more than current service, for the $10 million-per-mile construction cost, or even for the next engineering round. If the route has any chance of getting built, the current plan will have to survive further federal review.

So objections like these (ultimately submitted via email, not comment card) have a reasonable chance of making an impact. Chicago is full of surprises.

The last neighborhood school

Last month the Chicago Board of Education voted to close 50 schools, one a daily jog down Augusta Boulevard from my house. I don't have children there, and neither do my neighbors. Which is strange, because Elizabeth Peabody Elementary School is what the school district calls a neighborhood school -- in fact, the last neighborhood school in the East Village neighborhood. Principals, police and parents will stay busy this summer figuring out how to resume classes at another school in another neighborhood.

It's a curious turn of events at Peabody. This spring I blogged about it, which made me something of a neighborhood expert. The alderman dropped my name at a public hearing downtown. (Or at least he tried -- it came out Steve Rysznyski.) Public radio called for an interview too, but not much came of it. The reporter told me I don't speak in sound bites. Maybe I can work on that, but for now this will take a couple minutes to unpack.

Neighborhood schools are the city's name for open-enrollment schools. There are 398 neighborhood elementary schools in Chicago, four times as many as all others combined. With all the attention paid to magnet and charter schools, it's a bit of a surprise that there are only 39 magnets and 20 charters.

This in fact is the 40th anniversary of the Chicago magnet school, which is a specialty school that does not have to accept kids from the neighborhood. My nearest school is a magnet: LaSalle II Language Academy, which teaches Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and Urdu. It used to be the Hans Christian Andersen Community Academy, a neighborhood school, but as the community improved the school did not. As a magnet, now there's a waiting list and an active local school council. Two parents I know got involved while waiting for a son or daughter to come off the waiting list.

Magnets are so popular that many of the community schools have become mini-magnets. Otis Elementary, where Peabody students will move this fall, is a Magnet Cluster school teaching Latin, Italian and Spanish. Talcott School, another West Town school that draws from East Village, is the city's only museum school, with three museums as partners and a lot of field trips.

Another surprise finds 17 buildings preserved as "small" schools, where teachers know everyone in the building and collaborate on classwork. (The city also counts eight special-ed, five classical and four contract schools.) Peabody is not designated a "small" school, it's just small -- 255 students. In this case though, small is not favored: Size made Peabody a target for closing four years ago. But when the school showed up again on the list of potential closings, size made it simple during my morning run to knock on the door, meet the principal and learn more.

Peabody is competitive in science fairs, but it's not designated as a STEM school either. Mostly its known for a 98% low income student body that is three-fourths Hispanic, with many families of limited English proficiency. At the local hearing on its closing, there was a constant crosstalk of simultaneous translation into Spanish. Peabody has managed to work its way off a watch list, but raising test scores likely would remain a heavy lift.

Since Otis has no spare classrooms, the Peabody merger will pack Otis 30 students to a homeroom. Most likely some classes will be much bigger to free up space for Peabody's 42 special-ed students. At the neighborhood meetings, the local police superintendent was upfront taking notes. By most accounts there are several gangs operating in the mile between the two schools, making for a dicey twice-daily walk. The map the school district gave parents shows the direct route to Otis is through an alley.

Peabody does not have a high-profile school council, and I was the only person in our community group in contact with Peabody staff. Fellow volunteers all wondered what would come of the building, a red-brick Italianate dating from 1895. The city had just spent the better part of a year closing a nearby police station and finding another law-enforcemnt tenant. The school will be a tougher case, because the teachers' contract limits education uses for closed buildings and because so many will hit the market at once.

So what does it mean that my neighborhood is losing its neighborhood school? Maybe not much. Magnet schools still have rummage sales and outings and assemblies. But not everyone in the neighborhood is invited: Their kids are in the neighborhood school, and that's in another neighborhood. After 40 years of magnet schools, we still have a lot to learn.

On the TV news, students are crying and parents are angry. The drama is understandable: These schools are the only ones most pupils know. But it's difficult to see how raising class sizes will raise test scores for the displaced kids or their new classmates. And it's difficult to see this debate play out the same way with magnet schools up for elimination, their angry parents already successful at fighting for their sons and daughters' seats in class. Whatever the benefits of consolidation -- and the schools' revenue issues are profound -- the choice of targets leave parents with the feeling they were never in a fair fight.

The best result of the process is that consolidation moved these questions front and center, even if answers have not yet followed. Principals and police will be under pressure to make mergers work. But accountability also will demand that parents and neighbors keep watch, make new connections and likely fight for funds to deliver on the city's promises. We'll all need to embrace a wider concept of community and acknowledge the role education plays in our safety and success. The classrooms are gone. Our responsibilities are not.

Rahm touches the third rail, gingerly

When Rahm Emanuel was in the White House, he called immigration "the third rail of American politics," which probably set some heads scratching. Not many politicians come from districts with an electrified rapid transit system. But his meaning was clear: It's a charged issue. Don't even touch it, or you'll get a jolt you may not survive.

Now Emanuel has a new job and a new third rail. Last month as mayor he made plans to cut Chicago services next year. His first budget closes three police stations, one at 29th and Prairie in Bronzeville, another in Roscoe Village at Belmont and Western and another at Augusta and Wood, a quarter-mile from where I live in East Village. In making the announcement, Emanuel called closing police stations "the third rail of Chicago politics."

This time he wasn't steering clear; Emanuel made it a centerpiece of his budget even before his police chief could say where the cops would park their squad cars. So has it really been such an untouchable issue?

As you might expect, neighbors are opposed to the police station closing, and I can tell you how that's playing out. But it's not the only issue that can get people charged up. Pretty quickly I started seeing e-mails about cuts in library hours and 9-1-1 dispatchers. A letter from aldermen wants money put back into graffiti removal. A week before the City Council votes on the budget, I'm hearing about the six mental health clinics that would close.

I'm not hearing the high-voltage sizzle of the third rail in any of this, just a lot of static. Closing squadrooms is only one of his budget gambits, and not even the one that has gotten the most buzz.

Let's look more closely at the East Village closing. Even before Emanuel produced his budget, newspapers were identifying the 13th District as the unlucky one to lose its station house. But what does that mean? Many Chicagoans aren't quite sure what neighborhood they live in, much less which police district. When police arrested four men in a Wicker Park foot chase, the 13th District got online kudos, even though Wicker Park is not in the 13th District.

About all the station house determines is where officers show up for roll call at the beginning of their shift. The Wood Street squadroom is built like a 1950s fallout shelter but showing its age. The lockup was shut down four years ago and prisoners are transported elsewhere. In closing the station house, police move to a new building with efficient heating and new computers.

Neighbors fear what would happen without police showing the flag in their backyard, yet the city's own crime statistics show nearly as many incidents near the Wood Street station as elsewhere in the district, maybe just a bit quieter just for being located on a side street.

It's more telling how many police are on patrol, and here's where Emanuel's third rail begins to look more like an extension cord. Emanuel pledged to “put 1,000 more police on the streets” but the budget sends 50 new recruits will enter the police academy, a number that won't even offset the number of cops nearing retirement. The city has reassigned street teams into the beats, which hasn't put new cops on the street.

With the police taking $190 million in cuts, about the best Emanuel can say about manpower was that he isn't larding the budget with positions he had no intention of filling.

In this environment, one neighborhood fear about merging police districts has some merit. The remaining cops are more likely to be shifted to where there's more crime. It's hard to get upset over that. But the city has been moving cops around the city for years, so we have some idea where that might lead. When Taste of Chicago borrows cops from the neighborhoods, we literally see fireworks: Every Fourth of July our neighborhood lights up with bottle rockets, Roman candles and firecrackers set off in alleys. None of this is legal in Illinois. It's an open question whether other crimes will be tolerated the same way.

If Emanuel were serious about changes in crimefighting, he would have to put up money for crimefighters. He can't do it with spare change. But none of the city's budget cuts have had anywhere near the impact of the prospect of new taxes. Water and sewer fees are rising. So are taxes at parking garages and hotels. Street-corner cameras soon will start tracking drivers for speeding. And the mayor already has caved in on one of the aldermen's hot-button issues: the prospect that city stickers would cost more for SUVs than for economy cars.

The real problem with these taxes is that they bring so little to the table. Somehow Emanuel plans to find $25 million by putting billboards on bridge houses, blue bins, garbage trucks, snowplows, light boxes and lifeguard towers. Selling ads to pull out of a financial jam is no sure thing. Just ask around at the Tribune.

Read my lips: Raising taxes have always been the real third rail of politics. Emanuel has been giving a wide berth to this danger zone. He may live to regret it.

It's the end of the boom as we know it, and I feel fine

At the Happy Village tavern, a neighbor confessed he's watching the real estate market from the sidelines, waiting to buy at the market's low point. From that barstool perch, the parade may already be passing him by.

The sales pace in West Town is indeed off 30 percent from last year. Yet property values have risen 3 percent, according to the Chicago Tribune's Market Pulse analysis of property transfers.

West Town's median price of $400,000 is up 20 percent in five years. The sales numbers pace 2003 levels. Prices increased this year in 24 of the city's 77 census areas, including nearly all lakeshore communities.

The Illinois Association of Realtors' Chicago area statistics show values down 3 percent overall — hardly a free fall. Condo prices were up by a greater percentage. The typical sales commission wouldn't cover the difference between the median-priced condo and midpriced home.

The overall picture masks some sad individual cases, as this week's foreclosure report suggests. So-called sub-prime loans have fallen down the rabbit hole, and many families with them. In the first three months of the year, foreclosures started on 6.35 percent of adjustable loans in that higher-risk category, nearly triple the overall rate.

Foreclosures ran apace in only seven states, however, with the Great Lakes trouble spots (Michigan, Ohio and Indiana) starting to shore up. It could get worse. It could get better. Or, as the regional gaps suggest, it's all about location. Many neighborhoods will stubbornly hold their own as bystanders await their collapse.

The tippling point

A reporter in a bar would be the definition of an unreliable source. Same with Malcolm Gladwell at a storytelling performance. In Slate, Jack Shafer calls out the author of "The Tipping Point" for a performance at the NYC story event The Moth. Bunk, the subhead claims. Well, yeah....

Gladwell's tall tale of journalist apprenticeship reminded me of the after-hours yarns told at Chicago newspaper hangouts, as well as Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's insider scenes in "The Front Page" and satirical novels from Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" to Charles Dickinson's "Rumor Has It" and Calvin Trillin's "Floater." Like most fiction, all germinate from a seed of truth. Nelson Algren's short stories from "The Neon Wilderness" is my current occupation on the 66 Chicago bus. Algren wrote fiction and nonfiction set on the West Town streets where this bus now trolls, and often it's hard to tell which is which.

One of Gladwell's conceits was a variation on the "Order of the Occult Hand." Old-school reporters were initiated into this virtual society by getting an article published using the phrase "It was as if an occult hand..." Fans of The Onion would appreciate this sendup of journalistic convention, documented by (among others) editorialist Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and reporter James Janega of the Chicago Tribune. Gladwell looks to be an Occult Hand apprentice.

Extreme times call for extreme measures

Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth till he sprouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.
Herman Melville, "Moby Dick, or the Whale"

Captain Ahab had a boatload of earnest accomplices on his quest for the Leviathan. Thus it ever was with change we can believe in. The presidential campaign has taken on rising stakes and a meaner tone. Any sign of nuance, from Mitt Romney's benchmarks for Iraq to Barack Obama's thoughts on Ronald Reagan, are taken for signs of weakness. Extreme values are the measure of unlikely behavior.

When Barry Goldwater said, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," his words to the 1964 Republican Convention were a strange echo of Dr. Martin Luther King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail" a year earlier: "So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?" Whatever your concept of liberty, it's bound to be something worth fighting for.

Tribune Company's liberty was at stake whenSam Zell took over at yearend, and the company's core values changed nearly overnight. At least the 1991 corporate mission statement got a grand rewrite. It's hard to pledge yourself to "Create premier branded content." I'd rather "Play to win," particularly when the Sun-Times is spelling out the price of failure.

In catching up with the Sun-Times buyouts, I missed the news that the Sun-TImes is abandoning its Booster weekly newspapers. Oak Park's Wednesday Journal will extend its city footprint by taking over over the former Lerner imprint, along with the Booster and News-Star. East Village/Wicker Park is one of the few neighborhoods in which the two chains currently compete. Likely that will not continue. Update: The Booster's new owner confirmed that its coverage area was retreating to Lake View. )

One rogue trader may have lost the Societe Generale bank $7.14 billion, spooked futures exchanges worldwide and escalated the Fed's extreme makeover of the U.S. economy. Playing to win is sometimes literally going for broke. Said Mr. Starbuck: "God keep me!—keep us all!"

That's life. This is Walgreens.

It seems like a man-bites-dog situation. The neighborhood tells a developer to go big or go home.

The East Village Association has been lobbying for a building at Ashland and Division that would be more of a neighborhood anchor than the chain restaurant it would replace on the southwest corner.

This week the developer presented his concession to the community: a chain drugstore.

Residents were upset. But should it surprise anyone when a large retailer and busy developer make decisions based on short-term profit? And can we blame them for not taking risks when we make it so easy to go for the quick money?

That's how Polish Broadway got paved for a Pizza Hut. And that's how the new gateway to my community is going to be a big red W under glass.

Ald. Manny Flores seemed to have a golden opportunity in reviewing the project. Here was a chance to replace a single-story billboard — a building that couldn't even be vacated till its trademark red mansard roof was papered over. As it turned out, he might as well have told the developer, "No, that's just not good enough. My constituents really want a two-story billboard."

Here was a chance to stiffen the developer's spine, to show how there were smart, profitable ways to fill a community need other than (1) drive-in retail or (2) drive-in retail plus condos, and that the perfect complement to a bank building is not precast concrete.

Instead, the Polish Triangle, one of the few public spaces on Division that hasn't been converted to a sidewalk cafe, most likely will become an arrow pointing to the snack-food aisle.

Still, I can't blame politicians when they build playlots instead of parks, or extract taller store windows as a development concession. After all, this month Flores held hearings in the ward to ask what a new library was worth to us. And we responded: Cash in at the casino. Don't raise taxes. Our kids can find books somewhere else.

Of course, the commercials are right. We don't live anywhere near Perfect. So there's Walgreens.

All the children are above average

The first look at standardized test results are out, and 64.8 percent of Illinois Scholastic Aptitude Tests at Andersen School this year had passing grades, vs. 64.1 percent citywide.

That was 269th out of the 527 schools for which the city posted composite scores. Not high enough to rate boasts in the real estate ads, but much better than the 31.2 percent just four years ago.

Like many schools, science grades slipped while math improved strongly (70.8 percent passed).

Composite scores nearby include 67.0 percent at Peabody, 71.5 percent at Sabin, 72.7 percent at Burr and 78.7 percent at Pritzker.

EVA's annual leadership crisis

Laura Putre writes in Chicago Journal about the imminent demise of the East Village Association. By now this story is as seasonal as asparagus recipes in the food section. But this spring's death of EVA may not be greatly exaggerated. The current president has failed the volunteer leader's first job, scoping out a successor.

EVA navigated the contentious landmarking debate by avoiding the issue, and as preservation activists drifted away no one took their place in the leadership. I offered less controversial help to attract a new branch library, but was rebuffed. Meetings had scant agendas, and even the restaurant outings popular with new members are discontinued. What's left?

The only place to read Putre's assessment is on the Web: The print edition mistakenly replated sister publication Austin Voice on the jump page.

Ald. Flores makes small plans

Ald. Manuel Flores told Tuesday's East Village Association meeting that he was allocating a sizable amount of his $1.3 million discretionary funds for the year toward reconstructing the playlot at Commercial Park, 1845 W. Rice.

This is an unusual and laudable use of ward earmarks — and running unopposed in next month's municipal elections gives him considerable freedom. But at this meeting the alderman held out little hope for more costly park development in his rapidly growing ward.

While he says preliminary discussions are under way with owners of property adjoining Commercial Park, he favors the Chicago Avenue frontage as a potential library site. Across the street, he wants the 13th District police squad (which police have reportedly considered disbanding) to stay in place.

Asked about the Damen Avenue site of Bear Stewart as a potential city purchase, Flores flatly said, "we just don't have the capital for that." Flores said he was interested in retaining Damen Avenue's residential character, but that development was more likely in the 32nd Ward.

A decade of development has brought many new households, yet bid up prices for remaining parcels. Land isn't getting cheaper. Yet Flores did not indicate that any new park development was in discussion, although he suggested nonprofits like suburban wetlands restorer CorLands could be enticed to the table. The Trust for Public Land bought land the park district will repay in the $1 million expansion of Haas Park.

"We have to be smart about what can be done and what can't be done," Flores said, signaling that he'd be looking to neighborhood groups like EVA for cover: "Form a group to work with me and let's get it done."

Flores does see one park opportunity: Reserved parking for the nonprofit I-GO carpools, as part of a plan to consolidate current restricted parking areas under a single zone. He allowed under questioning that many people would be better off hailing cabs.

Edmar turnover, and a new leaf

Maybe it's watercress.

The bugs aren't much of a clue.

Hmm.

Brenda and I are sizing up leafy vegetables in a plastic container, part of this week's shipment from Home Grown Wisconsin, a restaurant supplier that's stocking our fridge this summer.

We've subscribed to a community supported agriculture project along with a few neighbors. Every other week we walk down the street and pick up a box of veggies, then take them home, bag them and try to plan menus around them. The first box contained chard, spinach and other leafy plants, not all of which we've identified, plus strawberries, rhubarb and three fennel bulbs.

It wouldn't work without online recipes for the menu planning. Google Images initially was no help on the mystery veg, but it seemed to confirm a neighbor's ID, sunflower greens. (Added another neighbor, "It's not a bug, it's a feature.")

This stuff wasn't showing up at Edmar, now closed for for remodeling as a future Dominick's. The Chicago Avenue grocery did its best to grow with the neighborhood, stocking shelves with chai tea and extra-virgin olive oil as well as tortillas and tripe. But produce always seemed to be the remainder aisle, and there was a growing list of what we wouldn't buy again at Edmar.

Ald. Flores continues to negotiate with Dominick's on concessions to the neighborhood, the Journal reports. He got a lot of heat about the prospect of rising prices, although attempts to prove price differences always seemed suspect.

No doubt prices will rise, because Dominick's carries higher-quality items and pays better wages. Courteous workers at the inner-city locations seem to really enjoy their jobs. I'll be glad to see them here, if the Journal doesn't first banish me to Naperville for expressing such Tory notions.

Fresh talk

Restaurateur Jerry Kleiner (Marche, Opera, Carnivale) gives his alderman a blunt assessment of condo development in Chicago Journal.

Lava Lounge fault line

Who knew that the City of Chicago couldn't generate an accurate voter registration list? This month tons of fliers praising or damning various politicians arrived at my home off Damen Avenue — not one addressed to a previous occupant.

None of that mail was prepared to tell a complete story, and unfortunately neither was Chicago Journal when it editorialized that voter lists are stacked against the Lava lounge's new owners' attempt to retain a liquor license. Unchallenged was the assertion that hundreds of ex-residents remained on voter rolls, raising the bar impossibly high in overriding a tavern moratorium.

The editorial stated that "we're pretty sure" there was no public attempt at compromise (presumably between the owners and those obstinate ghost voters). Yet an accompanying story alluded to just such an effort early on, a community meeting in which the owners' attempts to press their case were complicated by the presence of actual residents.

It continued with an equally blithe statement that "perhaps" the bar's neighbors favor high-end cookie-cutter development over variety, although that stretch of Damen has yet to acquire such tastes. Liquor moratoriums don't get enacted where there's business diversity. Bars still outnumber boutiques south of Division — not a shoe store in sight — and they present remarkably similar closing-time headaches.

This week Chicago Journal was a finalist in the Peter Lisagor Awards for Exemplary Journalism, for a story in which Max Brooks spent time getting to know the owners and patrons of Ashland Avenue taco stands. If only Chicago Journal could have brought that kind of attention to the corner of Damen and Iowa.

Last word on landmarks

What's left to say about the East Village Landmark District after a year of debate? With one final hearing left to attend, I put my reporter's training to work and pulled the clips.

In 1989 it was feared that the Wicker Park landmark district, as reported in the Tribune, would boost property values so high that gentrification would displace the district's residents. A few years later, the calculus involving South Side neighborhoods was whether they were viable enough to reap the economic benefits of landmark status.

How strange that the debate over landmark protection is now whether it will retard development.

Local history suggests that communities thrive or wither for factors quite apart from landmark protection. Benefits are limited to the districts' intended purpose: to protect the characteristics that make a neighborhood unique and invite its growth. Neighbors propose landmark designation not for how it will make their property more valuable, but for what they value in the neighborhood.

East Village other

Laura Putre of Chicago Journal is correct in a Dec. 8 Viewpoints piece (not available online) that the name East Village is of fairly recent vintage. When University of Chicago sociologists knocked on doors in the 1960s, residents south of Division and east of Damen told canvassers they lived in Wicker Park. Polonia also was common coinage; a residence on Winchester Avenue north of Iowa Street has Polonia Dairy Co. carved into the stone, a relic of another day.

However, the name East Village dates at least to 1984, when the East Village Association was organized. Likely the founders of the community improvement group wanted to identify the area more closely with tidy Ukrainian Village than with troubled Wicker Park. The blue street signs with the East Village logo, which appeared on lamp posts across the group's boundaries from Milwaukee to Damen avenues and from Division Street to Chicago Avenue, have fallen victim mostly to rust.

South of Chicago or east of Milwaukee, as the seniors Putre interviewed recalled, you were in West Town, or perhaps Noble Square, a name that survives in the co-op apartments on Milwaukee Avenue. As crime receded and vacant lots were developed throughout West Town in the 1990s, real-estate ads started to spread the East Village name beyond its original boundaries.

It's good that Chicago Journal has moved into the neighborhood. It won't be long before Chicago Journal will be seen as a local fixture, or perhaps as another creation of real-estate developers.