Who would have thought that Petula Clark would turn out to be an urban policy seer? Perhaps you saw the SJ-R report about the “Sustainable Design Assessment Team” brought in to advise on how to keep the downtown Springfield of the 2010s from sliding back into the downtown of the 1980s. One of the architect-members […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
There goes the neighborhood
Buildings are like people. Even when they get too old and decrepit to work, their examples can still teach. Something like 100 buildings from the Lincoln era are thought to still stand in Springfield. Most of them, unfortunately, are houses that, being quite small and much amended by their many owners and in the wrong […]
Posted inOpinion
Wanderings and doings
Yes, kids, I really did used to walk two miles to school. For the whole of my ninth grade year in 1962-63, I often walked from Washington Junior High at 21st and Jackson to our house near the Statehouse. I was not moved by any of the current faddish arguments for walking. Nor was I […]
Posted inOpinion
College credit
In January, the University of Illinois announced it was raising its tuition on new undergraduates at its three campuses yet again. Lamentation was general throughout the land. Tuition for residents at Illinois public colleges and universities used to be somewhere below laundry among the various costs of going to college, but it’s been outpacing inflation […]
Posted inOpinion
Such a deal
By the late 1980s, Sears & Roebuck had lost the knack of selling America its school clothes and car tires like it used to. However, it was still able to sell the governor of Illinois, the General Assembly and the mayor of Hoffman Estates a suit with no pants and make each think he got […]
Posted inOpinion
A new old street
The National Park Service has released its final general management plan that sets the parameters for development and preservation at the Lincoln Home National Historical Site for at least the next 15 to 20 years. It matters, even to the many Springfieldians who visit the place only to show visiting new in-laws around, since the […]
Posted inOpinion
Just what you want to do
Springfield’s School District 186 has set up a web page titled “Where Are They Now?” On it, graduates of Springfield public schools are invited to “share their success stories with the SPS community.” In fact the purpose of the website is to share District 186’s success stories with the larger Springfield community; the spinning at […]
Posted inOpinion
The mysteries of space and time
I wouldn’t want to be quoted on it, but I think it was Michael Burlingame, in his comprehensive biography of the 16th president, who revealed that Abraham Lincoln started thinking about a new career in Washington because he could never find a parking place downtown. In this complaint Lincoln – who was in so many […]
Posted inOpinion
Get Out of Jail cards
Writers of newspaper columns, it turns out, are not the only people who have trouble getting sentences right. Eyebrows, if not voices, were raised when federal judge James Zagel set 14 years in prison as the price Rod Blagojevich must pay for nearly committing a crime. That’s only one year short of the maximum that […]
Posted inOpinion
Good and true
Here’s a recap for those who spent the past few weeks standing in line at Walmart: In November, Bill Cellini, Springfield’s very own robber baron, was convicted on federal charges of attempting to extort a Hollywood producer eager to protect a profitable business deal with a State of Illinois agency. After the trial, it was […]
Posted inOpinion
Making noises in civics class
Have you ever thought about how much Freddie Mercury’s Queen owed to the works of Gilbert and Sullivan? You have? Okay, we’ll talk about something else. The other day State Rep. Bill Mitchell (R-Hickory Point Mall) introduced a resolution in the Statehouse that would ask Illinois voters to decide by referendum whether Cook County should […]
Posted inOpinion
War without the killing
Certain Republicans have given way to fits of partisan bloodlust lately and tried to beat the current president with the bones of one of his long-dead Democratic predecessors. Franklin Roosevelt, they insist, deserves no credit for ending the Great Depression, since it was not FDR’s recovery policies that put Americans back to work but spending […]
