requiem for yet another building set to be demolished on my street

West of Western Ave, they don't care what you do with the old buildings. Maybe Walmart should have tried to build their store in Humboldt Park. Lord knows they're letting these developers get away with everything else...

I've lived on my block for 4 years now. Since then, especially in the last 2 years, eight buildings have been torn down. That's almost half of all the buildings on my block. That's not even counting the building's they've gutted out and rehabbed. The street is almost always a construction zone--jackhammers, hammers, cement mixers. It's a good thing I don't need silence to write. I wrote to my Alderman, who's supposed to be progressive and a real alternative to the Daley Machine, but alls I got back was a form letter telling me my street is zoned ADFARTEFGASD3533 (or whatever), and I don't know what the code meant; presumably, it means you can raze all the character out of a block in favor of $500,000 condos: maximum security leisure prisons for investors. But I stay. The rent is cheap, for Chicago. On the practical side, I would hope that this boom in reconstruction is making millionaires out of the Eastern Europeans who own these now-lucrative properties.

I say this because, while writing today, I heard the violent thud of sledgehammers. Yup, another old building is getting torn down. The fences are up. Bring on the bulldozers.

This appears to be the oldest house on the block, but still occupied until just last month. It's a faded brown bricked two-story cottage. A twenty-foot chimney rises from the roof. Next to it is an old TV antenna. In front of the front door (now ripped away) is a small dark red porch, with three dark red steps leading up to it. There's a little awning, four white posts holding up a small roof, red trim on the top and bottom sandwiching gray roof shingles. The front windows are bisected by dark red trim, a curving pane on top, sideways bricks laid like the top of a circle. Below it is a gray ledge. The second floor window, above that awning roof and to the right of the first floor windows, look the same. Thick foggy glass makes the basement windows. Weeds grow in the small patch of dirt in front of the house. A two-foot high black iron fence encloses the property. The gray-shingled roof is faded.

I like this building for the same reason Ray Davies likes village greens and rrrrrrrrrrrrrroast beef on Sunday in the Autumn. Ignoring the ravenous needs of the marketplace for just a moment, I like old buidlings. Everytime they tear one down, in the name of some greedhead's conception of "progress," I find one less reason to live in this city and especially this neighborhood. Hell, even Lincoln Park's starting to look quaint and working class compared to this. So far, I'm not impressed with the New Millenium. (Except for Myspace and Youtube.) I like small businesses and sturdy homes built to last through over 100 Chicago Winters, and I have my doubts that these shoddy cinder-blocked condos will even last 10, and even if they do, they still retain all the character of miniature Chicago Sun-Times buildings.