Illinois – James Krohe Jr

Clear Lake Avenue needs more trees. PHOTO BY BRITTANY HILDERBRAND Careful readers of his paper will know that Sustainable Springfield is encouraging businesses and landowners to allow the organization to plant native and/or non-invasive tree species on their properties, starting with the Clear Lake Avenue corridor. Any proud native who wishes Springfield to make a […]

In 1983 Springfield was working on a new idea – geting more people to live downtown. This week our look back over IT’s 40 years is occasioned by the City of Springfield’s halting efforts to redevelop the Y block. Hopes that a residential building here will magically transform downtown are extravagant, as this column from […]

Kenneth C. Griffin PHOTO BY PAUL ELLEDGE Homeopathy figures prominently in the annals of medical quackery. It is based on the idea, or rather the hope, that “like cures like,” meaning that a disease can be cured by whatever produces similar symptoms in healthy organisms. Homeopathy has been relegated to the fringes as medicine but […]

Mark Mahoney, city public works director, at the April 21 open house to show off IDOT’s alternatives for MacArthur Boulevard. PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE You wouldn’t ask a carpenter how to build a happy marriage. The residents and business owners along MacArthur Boulevard between South Grand and Wabash did something similar when they asked traffic […]

ILLUSTRATION BY JASON BENAVIDES/TNS The memory of it lingers after 50 years. Lunchtimes when I was a student in District 186 schools meant mock pizza pie. While that dish was an awful eating experience, it was a valuable learning experience, because pondering what was in it made me realize that not everything I was being […]

Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie Everyone who cares enough to have an opinion agrees that revenue is at the heart of the State of Illinois’ present distress. Some say that’s because the state doesn’t raise enough of it, others that it raises it inefficiently or unfairly, yet others that it spends what it raises foolishly. They’re […]

The French misheard the Indians and the Americans misread the French. I was in the waiting room at the doctor’s office the other day. I’d already read that week’s OK! magazine at home, so instead I picked up a copy of “Illinois Voices: Observations on the Illinois-Miami Language,” by Michael McCafferty, an Algonquian and Uto-Aztecan […]

This week I dust off a Prejudices column from June 3, 1993, when same-sex marriage was illegal in Illinois and many Springfieldians still believed that same-sex love should be too. Tom Chiola, by the way, went on to serve as a judge of the Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County from 1994 to 2009; he […]

The State House Inn, designed by Henry L. Newhouse II, was the most stylish hotel in Springfield when it was built. After a 2003 reincarnation, it retains the title today. PHOTO COurTESY SANGAMON VALLEY COLlECTION AT LINCOLN LIBRARY Much in the way that human corpses become food for the worms, dead eras become food for […]

ILLUSTRATION BY RICK NEASE/TNS   Some 30 years ago I was moved by the mindless boasting of the Republican blowhard in the White House to write this column, which appeared in the Prejudices series on Aug. 8, 1985. The presidential field at the moment offers us several others of the type, so I thought my […]