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Old Posted Jul 19, 2014, 3:54 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila View Post
Now MVVA is fixing to tear up one of the few nice, fresh modern parks we have downtown, by a world-renowed firm (not just some local hacks) just so the wealthy new residents can get a swingset and a place for their dogs to crap. It's like when Trump ripped out all the nice grasses in his riverfront plaza, except worse - and that plaza had the same original designer as Parkview West! Hargreaves can't get no love around here.
Exactly. How does Reilly have this kind of power, anyway? (It's a rhetorical question, Mr. Downtown.) The entire make-up of our neighborhoods—built environment, obviously, but also the types of amenities and businesses—is determined by the fraction of the city's residents who therein live. For more insular neighborhoods, the effects don't or don't seem to broadly ripple across the region or even the city; but when you're talking about neighborhoods that are plainly as vital to the people who don't live there as the people who do, you realize what a mess the system is. And so whole swathes of downtown Chicago—the epicenter of a 9.5-million-person-strong metropolis—reflect the tastes and desires of a vocal minority of its residents funneled through some populist mouthpiece with just enough autonomy to allow his own capricious whims or ill-informed beliefs a place in the desecration of the cityscape. It's confounding and infuriating.