Second Thoughts

In a 2012 column I recalled the bad deal made by the State of Illinois in 1989 when it caved it to threats from Sears, Roebuck to move its Merchandise Group out of Illinois. The package authorized a new TIF-like Economic Development Area (EDA) that diverted property tax revenues from local schools to the company, nearly 800 acres […]

 More on happiness in, and with cities, a topic I touched on in “Land of mope and worry.” Wages and housing alone don’t predict where people want to live very well. Cities like San Francisco, which have hideously high housing costs and awful traffic, nonetheless are always ranked toward the top on most lists of […]

A while back, I edited and wrote chapter introductions to a collection of essays on the influence of Daniel Burnham, the architect-turned-city planner whose 1909 Plan of Chicago gave Chicago its famous downtown lakefront and gave several generations of Springfieldians a reason to visit Illinois’ best and worst city. In that work I quoted from […]

 Imagine this scene: Having recognized that they share a common need, a group of well-intended parents gather and decide to found a Montessori school. They lease classroom space, they buy the necessary materials and furniture, they hire an experienced Montessorian to do the teaching, and they contract with other specialty firms to keep the place […]

 I have railed in print  about our national health care “system” that spends more and gets less for it than more advanced nations do because it buys not good health but “health care services.” I specifically complained about cardiovascular screening tests offered to the general population but screening for breast cancer also is overdone, as SJ-R […]

 Language wonks might recall my January column about the rise in American English of the all-purpose preposition, “All for one – and “for” for all.”  I spotted another instance of this curious usage while driving last weekend in the blessed precincts of Chicago’s suburbs, where a municipal street sign admonished drivers to “Yield for pedestrians.” […]

This week came sad confirmation of my complaint from 2010 that the State of Illinois’ stewardship of its major buildings amounts to slow-motion vandalism. Crain’s columnist Greg Hinz dropped by the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago, and found duct-taped carpet, corroding metal, leaking ceilings. The ex-gov himself calls it a scrap-heap. Concludes Hinz, “If […]

It’s a start.  The Springfield City Council on July 1 approved extending the existing cable television franchise agreement with Comcast, in spite of the many complaints aldermen receive about the company’s poor service and/or high prices. Under the circumstances – those being that no viable alternative to Comcast exists – it was the only choice. […]

 I noted my recent visit to Donner’s Pass in “Promised lands.” Trains go through that gap as well as trucks and cars, as Kevin Baker, a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, learned when he went through there while research his July 2014 piece on the state of American long-distance passenger trains, “21st Century Limited.” (The […]

 Rahm Emanuel seems determined to see George Lucas’ museum of the visual arts – what one Hyde Parker more accurately describes as “The George Lucas Museum of Perpetual Adolescence” – built on the Chicago lakefront. Chicago is full of go-getters, and VIATechnik, a firm that offers technical services to architects, sponsored ”an unofficial contest to design an […]

 In  “Squabbling over the inheritance,” I asked whether the State of Illinois, which governs a commonwealth rich in everything except good government, is capable of responsible stewardship of its own past. The evidence is not encouraging. I offer the stories recounted in “The First Century,” an article  in the Illinois State Museum’s Living Museum in […]

 A while back I complained about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that permitted the use of explicitly Christian prayers to open public meetings even though such rituals make it plain to non-Christians present that they are not part of the community. I belatedly ran across Chicago Reader columnist Michael Miner’s treatment of the same topic. Read […]