[VivaLFuego]

Thanks for the links obt. I'll post some later from home (with accreditation) - but anyone who complains about River North or the Near North Side now should see what it looked like in 1974: west of Wabash, it's amazing to see photographic evidence of the desolate parking lot warzone I remember from childhood, a useful reminder of how far it's come in re-establishing urbanity.

The flipside is seeing what the area looked like in 1950. Those intervening 25 years took quite a toll on the building stock. If you think about it, River North was the ideal place for vast seas of parking lots at that time (given the entertainment/leisure districts along Michigan & Rush and the employment district south of the river, the latter where no parking garages were allowed from the late 1960s to 1983 due to the Clean Air Act), so the lack of any historical preservation protection meant the destruction of low-rise substandard housing was rather inevitable.