Scene in Logan Square: Pumpkinfest 2009

Unity Park Advisory Council’s Pumpkinfest 2009  takes place Saturday, October 24, from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. in Unity Park at the corner of Kimball and Schubert Avenues.

Help the kids celebrate Halloween two Saturdays in a row! 

Come in costume for the costume parade.  Complete your costume with face painting.  Get to Pumpkinfest early for a free pumpkin to decorate (as long as supplies last).  Enjoy the music and general Halloween fun and frivolity!

Height and Milwaukee Avenue (Part I)

Another interesting point of view that came out of the Milwaukee Avenue Corridor Development Initiative (also see Open Space and Milwaukee Avenue [Part 1]) concerns the desired height of the buildings along Milwaukee Avenue.

It took several sessions just to get the question right so that it adequately reflected the sentiments of participants concerning height:

What average height do you envision for new buildings along Milwaukee Avenue?

Converting pavement for people

This year’s PARK(ing) Day on September 18 prompted New York Times’ By Design blogger Allison Arieff to write a piece on “Pavement to Parks,” which further prompted me to write this piece in the context of Open space and Milwaukee Avenue.

In writing about San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks program, which was apparently spurred on by New York City’s Plaza Program, Arieff writes:

(The) program creates spaces for people by reclaiming excess roadway, through the use of simple and low-cost design interventions.  What’s innovative about these parks isn’t so much the design as the implementation.  As Andres Power, urban designer at the San Francisco Planning Department explains, because there is no structure in place to do something like this “it fundamentally changes the old impasse of years of planning and just lets the space evolve over time.”

That last part about letting the space evolve over time got me thinking about the idea of permanently closing down Milwaukee Avenue between east- and westbound Logan Boulevard and Woodard Street

Open space and Milwaukee Avenue (Part II)

Not surprisingly, real estate experts at the last of the Milwaukee Avenue Corridor Development Initiative workshops did not share the community vision of open space along Milwaukee Avenue.

What the real estate experts may not know

As volunteers and people who do not live in the neighborhood, the real estate experts may not have known about the larger Logan Square community’s (though not necessarily Milwaukee Avenue’s, see Open space and Milwaukee Avenue [Part I]) lack of open space, and so may have lacked the context of the community’s desire for open space.

Like the community volunteers, they likely didn’t know of the plans and existing opportunities for open space on public properties along Milwaukee Avenue, but they did not feel that open space on private properties along Milwaukee Avenue was appropriate.

Not living in the area, there is another context that the real estate experts may not have known that may justify some open space:  One of the sites chosen for constructing a hypothetical development, was the Pay Half building at the northwest corner of Spaulding and Milwaukee Avenues, which, as those of us familiar with the area