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

Show your love for great places in Logan Square

No surprise, there are Great places in Logan Square.  Submissions are in; voting has begun.  Among the entries for the Metropolitan Planning Council’s What Makes Your Place Great? contest are two in Logan Square:

New Wave Coffee on Milwaukee Ave.

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Great places in Logan Square

Logan Square Farmers Market.  New Wave Coffee. El Cid’s patio. These are just some of the great places in Logan Square that I’ve mentioned in recent posts. Certainly there are many more.

What Makes Your Place Great? contest

The Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC), in partnership with the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), has a What Makes Your Place Great? contest underway to spotlight great public places in Chicago.

“Historic” Milwaukee Avenue

Comfort and Image of Milwaukee Avenue: in its history

The Project for Public Spaces identifies “Comfort and Image” as one of the key attributes of a great place (see diagram below or larger pdf diagram available to download). Much of what I’ve been writing about Milwaukee Avenue, and will continue to write about, has to do with
its comfort and image, or lack thereof at the present. While I’ve so far pointed out mostly the negatives or why it is not comfortable and does not have a good image, Milwaukee Avenue does have a historic quality (as does Logan Square as a whole) that contributes positively to its comfort and image and potential as a great place. Just ask the folks at Preservation magazine who just featured Logan Square in