“Adaptive reuse” of old structures is a surefire way to develop a unique and memorable urban space - Rainbo was no exception, with the structure having undergone a patchwork of budget-minded and gaudy modifications to gradually repurpose it for the changing times (it’s final incarnation being a very….urban (for lack of a better word…both in character and in clientele) roller rink. Flickr user juggernautco uploaded a series of photos he took just prior to Rainbo’s closing in 2002/2003… all photos in this thread are his, unless otherwise noted.

The place just oozed awesome character - another thing I couldn’t fully appreciate when I was there as a kid, though I’m glad for the memories. Speaking of memories, I have one very clearly of being here with a group of friends from Jewish Day School circa 4th grade, and skating around while singing along to Gillete (yes, that song. I’d sell a kidney to acquire a video of this memory.). The 69 Boyz and Real McCoy also featured rather prominently in the awesome Rainbo playlist.

Speaking of oozing, you can sort of tell the place was a dump. I also vaguely remember the filthy purple bathrooms…

Thanks for the refresh, juggernautco.

Of course, the rink was demolished a few years ago to make way for a large Condo and Townhouse development known as Rainbo Village. Now, I can accept progress just fine - in fact, the gradual repurposing of physical space (which includes, yes, demolition) is a key component of urbanity and is particularly crucial to Chicago’s identity, in particular - besides, this rat-infested dump with bags of human bones in the basement (yes…really… they found these during demolition) is a weak case of landmark preservation in any sense, and some nerd’s nostalgia isn’t justification enough to hold up progress.

THAT SAID…
Do you dirtbags really need to spit in our eye and name the new development after the thing you demolished? Check the site - they even named one of the components of the development “Rouge Gardens” presumably to ensure maximum grave-spinning. It’s just so… suburban - it’s the urban equivalent of demolishing all the trees and natural landscape then naming the cul-de-sac streets after them. Why must the real estate industry do this? Other recent examples of such gratuitous and unnecessary insult include, offhand:

• The Chicago Coliseum being replaced by Coliseum Park Condos.
• Capone’s HQ, the Lexington Hotel, replaced by Lexington Park.

Oh, and of course, the redevelopment is (1) clouded by obvious pay-to-zone corruption and (2) now in foreclosure. Whatevs. We have our memories, and that’s what counts…sort of. If you have any from Rainbo or other now-defunct Chicago skate venus from the 1980s/1990s (Route 66 on South King Drive comes to mind), please share!

That’s me after finding these photos.  Or maybe it’s one of the photos I found, dated 1949.  Anyway, I’ve previously discussed my reasons for fascination with urban space, particularly the temporal component of so many different people and different buildings using the same space for different purposes over extended periods of time, each contributing to the uniqueness of that space.  Aside from simple architectural beauty, this “flavor” of the urban fabric brought only by the chaotic mix of time and people are what give older cities their intense charm and character, and why newer, single-use suburbia is so bland and devoid of such character.  

Chicago, perhaps the quintessential city whose development, structure, and existence epitomized the industrial revolution and rise of global capitalism (other cities were bigger in size of course, but their identity was generally forged before or after the IR), has acquired it’s unique and complex character ironically in part through conscious disregard for the value of uniqueness of place and historic architecture (”public goods” such as the “feel” of a particular neighborhood are notoriously poorly captured via market pricing, hence the existence of movements to implement zoning, historical preservation laws, and so forth).  By this, I mean that Chicago has often rapidly and successively redeveloped the same urban space for the highest and best economic use, meaning almost no place in Chicago is frozen in time as a museum piece - rather, the oldest parts of the city (e.g. the Loop, Near North Side), which have seen dozens of waves of development, with perhaps 6+ buildings/uses and countless tenants inhabiting the same space over the short span of a mere 100-150 years, thus have a remarkably complex, assymmetric, interdependent identity and story.

Soooooo anyway, I came across this set of 400+ scanned slides of old Chicago photographs - street scenes, the people, the buildings - mostly 1950-1970, uploaded by user Zeus Of HollYWOoD.  Many of them are either unlabeled or labeled very generally e.g. “Looking through a brick window”  so my contribution here is the noodle-vault-scratching to identify the locations of each shot.  Unclear if the user took them himself, but I suspect not, rather him being a vintage photo buff who thankfully(!!) scanned his slides for us.  Obviously you should go check out the whole set, but I’ll share some of the gems.  

For Volume 1, we’ll explore photographs of the Near North Side.  As always, click the pic for full size.  First, here’s the east side of Rush Street looking north from Chestnut in 1967:

Wow, eh?  The block in the foreground (featuring ROVIN KIND GO GO GIRLS et al) is gone now, of course: the replacements are two luxury condo towers, 50 East Chestnut and the Bristol.  Chicago used to have tons and tons of bright signage all over its commercial and nightlife districts, but at some point our culture determined these were a blight and they’ve basically been graduallypractically zoned out of existence.  While Rush Street is still widely known as a nightlife district (with the triangle at Rush/State/Bellvue known affectionately as Viagra Triangle), by now this district really only extends from Oak/Rush north to Elm.  Not only did this entertainment district used to extend southwards to Chicago Avenue, but this was also quite a bit seedier than the upscale restaurants and bottle-service nightclubs of today - full of burlesque houses, porn shops, and more.  

The whole Near North Side had it’s dicy bits that have largely been sanitized - the intersection of Chicago/Clark was the epicenter of the Chicago prostitution scene, and a skid row extended down Clark from Chicago Avenue to the River, with flophouses and porn shops.  Obviously about 90% of that’s gone, but to this day there is a surviving smut district with 4-5 porn shops concentrated around the intersection of Clark/Hubbard - grandfathered in from before the city passed an ordinance requiring adult uses be at least 1000 feet from any residential units.

Here’s a day time view of the NE corner of Rush/Delaware - Mammy’s Pancake House appears in the night photograph above as well.

The fun extends around the corner and went up and down Delaware, too.  Heading east down Delaware, north side of the street:

At the eastern end of the block, visible in the second picture, was the elegant 900 N. Michigan building, an early example of large scale mixed-use with upper floor co-op apartments, I think some hotel, as well as ground floor retail and a courtyard restaurant.  The entire block that housed the above two scenes was demolished in the late 1980s for the construction of the massive landmark postmodern skyscraper 900 N. Michigan.  The western half of the block, former home of Mammy’s Pancakes, Tony’s Cellars, et al, now houses the 10+ story parking deck accompanying the skyscraper.

Looking the other way down Delaware:

Check out D’Agostino’s neon sign!  Want.  Some “BURLESX” too, please.

The fun continued northwards of course.  Here’s a 1974 view of the west side of Rush looking south from Oak Street:

Oh, what’d I’d give to grab a sandwich at Punchinello’s then stop by Bourbon Street for the Revue - ideally having arrived in that blue AMC Gremlin.  That building is long gone and replaced by sanitized retail, but interestingly that 4 story red brick building at the end of the block survived until very recently, housing a pizzeria on the first floor.  The building was supposed to be rehabbed, but the owner/developer mysteriously “discovered” structural issues and just demolished the whole thing, and we’ll soon be graced by ever more bland one-story retail where one can buy… yoga apparel.  Times change, eh?  The Faces nightclub in the foreground also became some random upscale retail, and also was demolished only recently to make way for the new Barney’s New York store.

The Near North has always been a study of contrasts - even mid-century, the vice districts were immediately adjacent to elegant Michigan Avenue with its upscale retail and dining, such as Le Petit Gourmet in the Italian Court, shown here in 1955:

Obviously, this is gone now, replaced by… Eddie Bauer and a movie theatre.

That’s it, for now - next volume will be Old Old Town during it’s counterculture gentrification and possibly some other desktop-wallpaper city scenes.  Stay tuned.  Here’s a parting shot showing the Edgewater Beach Apartments in the distance, before the development of the north shore skyline in the 1950s and 1960s:

Also, a 1949 beach babe rocking the granny panties.  Dude’s got a lot of photographs of babes.

Click on it for full-size.  Taken from the Nichols Bridge connecting Millenium Park to the newly opened Modern Wing.  Put together using the very easy and totally free Autostitch.

Renzo Piano’s Modern Wing opened this past weekend, making the Art Institute of Chicago the second-largest art museum in the country after the Met; no, this blog post is not a review, as unfortunately I haven’t actually gotten over there yet despite literally years of eager anticipation, both for the art contained within and the art of the building itself (particularly the new exhibit on architecture and modern industrial design).  In light of both, thought I’d share links to two slide shows /articles on these very subjects from the New York Times.  Long story short: success.  This is somewhat significant in itself, as it’s pretty hard to get a kind word about anything related to culture located outside of New York from a New Yorker… per Saul Steinberg, 1975:

eh, I just wanted an excuse to include that image.  Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff that the new wing is “the closest Renzo Piano has come in at least a decade to achieving a near-classical ideal.”  That’s some high praise.  Check out the reviews here:

Renzo Piano Embraces Chicago

A Grand and Intimate Modern Art Trove

Aaand the picture-pretty accompanying slide shows here:

The Modern Wing

Art, Elegantly Displayed

I think my favorite part, though, is his mother telling the press that she gave her son wedgies.

via the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.

The latest viral photo meme making the rounds (other recent ones have included LATFH… Cake Wrecks… then of course there is the ICHC/lolcat empire): http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com.

You know, these folk don’t actually seem too ridiculously out of line given the times (assuming this picture was, in fact, taken in the early-1980s).  Father’s outfit needs to make a comeback, stat.  Speaking of styles in need of resurgence…

Shorts and stockings (not to mention comically-perfectly linear height distribution).  Why not?

In my more ambitious moments I like to fancy myself a weekend/amateur logician (nyuk), and love arguing - I particularly relish arguing with lawyers, because they’e generally the best arguers around and have learned through their trade and training to employ the tools of logic (or, sometimes, illogic) in pursuit of convincing others of a position.  Tangential rant aside, the crux of argument is logic - and on that note, I quite enjoyed stumbling across RationalWiki, whose stated mission as a public knowledgebase is

1. Analyzing and refuting the anti-science movement.
2. Analyzing and refuting crank ideas.
3. Explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism.

I’ll just highlight a few entries out of their section on logical fallacies that made me smirk in reminiscence of arugments past.  The No True Scotsman fallacy is to avoid being associated with an unpleasant act by asserting that no true member of the group they belong to would do such a thing .  The equivocation fallacy is a particularly “good” one in that it’s subtle and goes hand-in-hand with moving the goalposts (albeit over a longer time frame, generally), redifining the groundwork by which an argument is assessed by changing the lexicon via the connotation of words.   

RationalWiki is generally geared towards refutation of poor logic applied by specific “crank” movements, e.g. creationists, various spectra of historical denialists, the myriad anti-science movements (vaccinations, etc.) and so on - identifying the logical groundwork for such refutation is a necessary precursor in addition to being fun and useful material to have on its own.

(Sidenote of geekiness: I note they use MediaWiki as their main wiki/kb engine, which might be overkill for the sites purposes - I spent quite some time setting up a now-defunct kb using this system at my employer, but it was basically multiple answers to questions no one asked.  I will add though that MediaWiki has a neat extension called Semantic that adds something resembling Semantic Web/Web 2.0 capability - from the end user standpoint, think Wolfram|Alpha-style intuitive querying capabilities, except with a conceptually much more powerful back end of data being based on a dynamic and infinite “web” of pages tagged with properties and units, rather than the structured mega-database-of-fixed-knowledge as in W|A.  Such semantic knowledgebases could actually be the Google-killer that W|A is hyping itself to be.  Wow, I went way off-topic here.)

Yep, the New York Times Personal Health section seems to advocate maximum dirt intake for the improved health of your growing baby.  Fair use except:

In studies of what is called the hygiene hypothesis, researchers are concluding that organisms like the millions of bacteria, viruses and especially worms that enter the body along with “dirt” spur the development of a healthy immune system. Several continuing studies suggest that worms may help to redirect an immune system that has gone awry and resulted in autoimmun disorders, allergies and asthma.  These studies, along with epidemiological observations, seem to explain why immune system disorders like multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma and allergies have risen significantly in the United States and other developed countries.

OK, first issue here is to reiterate the importance of the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.  Absent a controlled longitudinal study, all we have shown is, at best, a correlation that may or may not be spurious.  It does sound like there are some fruitful paths of future research here, given success in mice in utilizing worms to mitigate or reverse the effects of autoimmune disorders.  But don’t jump the gun and phrase the article such that you’re endorsing spoonfed bowls of dirt to Junior, pronto.

So what’s the evolutionary purpose of our infantile appetite for dirt?

“What a child is doing when he puts things in his mouth is allowing his immune responseto explore his environment,” Mary Ruebush… “Not only does this allow for ‘practice’ of immune responses, which will be necessary for protection, but it also plays a critical role in teaching the immature immune response what is best ignored.”

Ok.

“Children should be allowed to go barefoot in the dirt, play in the dirt, and not have to wash their hands when they come in to eat,” [Dr. Weinstock] said. He and Dr. Elliott pointed out that children who grow up on farms and are frequently exposed to worms and other organisms from farm animals are much less likely to develop allergies and autoimmune diseases.  Also helpful, he said, is to “let kids have two dogs and a cat,” which will expose them to intestinal worms that can promote a healthy immune system.

I’ll take a crack at positing an alternate evolutionary hypothesis: by testing our immune systems early and often, we help weed out the weakest genetic material by ensuring swift death of those with poor immune systems before they reach the unfortunate life stage of reproduction.  Of course, for many Malthusian-types, this explanation is a feature, rather than a bug.

Neat project by some computer science folk at Cornell: develop algorithms to mine 35 million photographs on Flickr to determine which cities are the most photographed in the world, and which landmarks/objects/locations feature most prominently in photographs within those cities. Abstract:

We investigate how to organize a large collection of geotagged photos, working with a dataset of about 35 million images collected from Flickr. Our approach combines content analysis based on text tags and image data with structural analysis based on geospatial data. We use the spatial distribution of where people take photos to define a relational structure between the photos that are taken at popular places. We then study the interplay between this structure and the content, using classification methods for predicting such locations from visual, textual and temporal features of the photos. We find that visual and temporal features improve the ability to estimate the location of a photo, compared to using just textual features. We illustrate using these techniques to organize a large photo collection, while also revealing various interesting properties about popular cities and landmarks at a global scale.

I really enjoy projects like this that combine analytical techniques from multiple disciplines, and of course as a database and datamining professional who deals with spatially-referenced data myself (har…) I’m partial to entertaining applications thereof.  More on that in a sec; let’s cut to the chase of how cities and landmarks sorted out (click it to enlarge):

So the John Hancock Center actually beats Sears Tower (yes it’s still named Sears Tower at least until the end of the month or so), which is pretty cool considering JHC is indeed the more visually elegant implementation of the Fazlur Khan structural system.  Art Institute is the only local museum to place.  Actually, a whole lot of things jump out: Seattle as the 8th most-photgraphed city in the world?  I suppose to a large extent, these results paint a demographic profile of the average Flickr user: that is, a somewhat tech- and design-savvy American.  This is a key point to mention in discussing all this, of course: that this table has substantial built-in self-selection bias based on who has a Flickr account.

I’m particularly amused by Las Vegas’s defining photo-inspirers: 5 out of the 7 directly reference locations that aren’t Las Vegas, including all of the top 4.  

For some quick geek chat: in total, they mined 60 million images, narrowing it down to about 35 million (that’s 2 terabytes of data) that could be accurately geocoded (that is, assignment of each photograph to a particular precise point in space).  Geolocation is performed via a combination of Flickr photo tags (”textual features”) and SIFT image processing (”visual features”).  Density, or the popularity of each landmark and city,  is then calculated via mean shift clustering, and consideration is also given to ensure that multiple photos by the same photographer don’t bias the results while nonetheless providing insight as to the path photographers take through cities in terms of both time and space.

Cool.

Anyway, first saw this at the news story here at physorg, which bizarrely emphasizes in the headline the potential to make online travel books as a result of this study.  Um, OK.  For a little more depth, check out the actual study here (PDF).

Citation

Title: Mapping the World’s Photos

Authors: David Crandall, Lars Backstrom, Daniel Huttenlocher and Jon Kleinberg

The animal kingdom provides further fodder:

Those are from the Bug Swap, Animal Renaissance, and Edible Architecure contests, respectively.

The contestants in the Future Films contest hit several out of the park.  For example…

Go check ‘em all out here.