I’m working on a column about the life of Springfield attorney and public citizen Logan Hay. Most of today’s Springfieldians who have heard of Logan Hay know him because his name was attached to his nobly proportioned house at South Grand Avenue. More imposing than graceful, the house was a bit of Monticello Hay had […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Grave matters
Cemeteries are not only places to park dead uncles while they await their maker. They also are, or were, parks, picnic grounds, trysting places, settings for patriotic rituals and party venues for teens happy to find one place where their elders didn’t shout at them to quiet down. But cemeteries also can be classrooms.Any person […]
Posted inOpinion
City of the dead
I’m writing about cemeteries this week. My focus is Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery, world-famous for being the final (one hopes) resting place of Lincoln and his family. But anyone who’s driven in the west suburbs of our great metropolis has probably come across Forest Park in Cook County. This is a town where cemeteries not only occupy scenic […]
Posted inOpinion
Poor outcomes
It is possible paint a picture with numbers. The State Journal-Register did it the other day when it used data from the Illinois Report Card, the state’s education data source, to draw before-and-after portraits of 15 area school districts from 2001 and 2016. I was particularly interested in one measure: how much of the enrollment […]
Posted inOpinion
Shame on you
The news from the Illinois Statehouse almost makes one nostalgic for the Illinois politicians of old, those sticky-fingered but charming rogues. Today’s Capitol, we learn, is a playpen for not at all charming jerks, creeps and pervs who feel not only empowered but entitled to prey on any females who cross their paths. Sex at […]
Posted inOpinion
Amazon deals
In “How high can you go?” (Nov. 16, 2017) I looked at the various proposals to lure Amazon’s proposed second national headquarters to Chicago. The issue of economic development subsidies looms large in the debate. I’ve done my share of complaining about them. ((See “Such a deal” from Jan. 26, 2012, […]
Posted inOpinion
New developments
In Business as usual” (Nov. 9, 2017) I looked at, por rather down on, the new economic development initiative known as the Sangamon County Project. There is more to be said. The focus of the effort, as ever, is on attracting makers of goods, not sellers or movers. The obsession with manufacturing as the centerpiece […]
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Shooting for the stars
In “Stellar! Stellar!”—a column lumbered with my lamest title ever—I explored the new fund drive to help build the University of Illinois’ Springfield campus. For space reasons I was unable to explore one of the hoped-for outcomes of that campaign, UIS’s plans to posthumously turn Lincoln into an adjunct faculty member by means of a […]
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Reading aloud
Unless we are blessed with snow, December hereabouts can be a grim month, which might have been one of the reasons that Vachel Lindsay decided to shuffle off this mortal coil on the fifth of that month back in 1931. Which melancholy reflection started a chain of thought that took me (mentally at least) to […]
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Bearing the burden of normality
In the Fall 2017 number of The Hedgehog Review, which is devoted to critical reflections on contemporary culture, Paul Christman explores life in ” a no-place that is also everyplace and anyplace”–the Midwestern U.S. It’s a topic I’ve touched on now and then (albeit with a more local focus, meaning the state of Illinois and its parts) […]
Posted inOpinion
How high can you go?
Usually, Amazon sells stuff at a discounted price. At the moment it is trying to sell something at the highest possible price – a second headquarters operation somewhere other than its hometown of Seattle. That takes in a lot of territory, and a hundred or so U.S. cities are competing for it. The prize (according […]
Posted inOpinion
Business as usual
In 2015, in a rare lucid moment (see “A place for business to live,” Aug. 6, 2015), I suggested that Mayor Jim Langfelder’s just unveiled economic development commission include not only the usual businesspeople and pols but labor economists, urbanists, tech-heads and an historian or two, the last to remind aldermen of all the economic […]
