Illinois State Museum Bruce Rauner the other day took action that, he explained in a press release, would “develop a sustainable fiscal model for the continued operation of the Illinois State Museum.” I’m a little behind on my reading – Highway Thru Hell reruns – so I thought we had a fiscal model that had […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Bruce Rauner, progressive
PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE Daydreaming the other day, I ran through my head some scenes from my imagined movie remake, Mr. Potter Goes to Springfield, in which Capra’s naïve do-gooder Jefferson Smith is replaced by Henry F. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. However, our own Mr. Potter, Bruce Rauner, also brings to mind real […]
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Bluffstone builds
At the Downtown Springfield Inc. annual awards dinner in January at the Wyndham City Centre, the Springfield Mayre Jim Langfelder talked about the most recent developments in the Bluffstone LLC proposal to build student housing downtown, which I wrote about it in “Doing development right.” The city council, you might remember, chose not to grant […]
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I call this progress
Reader Jay Kitterman CHA, director of the Culinary Institute at Lincoln Land Community College, writes to remind me that the death of Indian restaurants in Springfield in 1981 I described in a recent column has, happily, been remedied. “We now have two Indian Restaurants in Springfield. One is Taste of India. One of our students, Amandeep Kaur, is […]
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With 772 you get eggroll
As part of Illinois Times’ 40th anniversary observances, we will revisit in light of more recent events columns from James Krohe Jr.’s Prejudices series that ran from 1977 to 1994. Minor errors have been corrected and the pieces edited for length. The original, much longer essay can be read in its entirety on Krohe’s blog, […]
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Farmer Jim
Last week I remarked on a pretty good new book about corn and the Midwest from the U of I Press. (See “Where corn is god.”) I didn’t know it then, but when I became a magazine journalist my Springfield address doomed me to writing about corn. My first cover story for a national magazine […]
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The 1.4 percent solution
Back in June of 2015, in “The Razor blade in the apple,” I speculated about the likely effects if passed of Mr. Rauner’s ballyhooed property tax freeze. Among its provisions, the Rauner tax freeze would exempt local governments from the Prevailing Wage Act and allow those governments to limit what is on the table when […]
Posted inOpinion
Where corn is god
I grew up within a block of a corn field on the east end of Springfield. Nearly every weekend of those years we’d visit the relatives on their farm outside Beardstown; over the potholes and through the corn, to grandmother’s house we’d go, with me entranced by the corn rows, like the spokes of a […]
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Thriving on disturbed ground
Common buckthorn PHOTO BY ED SUBA JR./TNS The dread of the invader runs deep in every human. The savage acts on it unthinkingly, by reaching for a club; the civilized man and woman is no less vulnerable to it but considers it disreputable, rooted as it is in ignorance and racism, and tries to calm […]
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Free-market games
In my 2013 column, “Throwing in the towel,” I talked about the several proposals then on the table to treat elite college athletes like the semi-pros they really are. New York‘s Jonathan Chait makes a valuable contribution to the discussion in this recent piece, in which he argues against the notion of marketizing our youthful […]
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Giving back
I touched on only only a fraction of the issues regarding recycling in my recent column on that topic. The market for recycled materials is down, which is putting private recyclers under financial strain. Cheap oil makes it more profitable to make new plastic than to recycle old. People read less news on paper. China, which […]
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To our credit
A few further thoughts triggered by my recent column about the hoped-for restoration to health of the Ferguson Building at 6th and Monroe in downtown Springfield: The federal taxpayer significantly subsidizes such projects, since the tax credit earned by rehabbing properties in officially designated historic districts, as this one is, reduces the flow of money […]
