Do you remember the "literals" craze in the 1980s? Bags labeled "Brown Bag" and mugs labeled "Mug"? Did you know they did the same thing with buildings? The Rogers Park police station is living proof. In huge lowercase letters it reads, "police" on the wall nearest Clark. As if that could make up for the aggressively unattractive design. Maybe worse of all, it creates a huge windswept plaza along the most auto-dominated stretch of Clark. Optimistically there's a single bench. And what kind of trees were chosen for the plaza? Locust trees, whose most admirable quality is resistance to pollution.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Clark and Schreiber, northwest corner
Do you remember the "literals" craze in the 1980s? Bags labeled "Brown Bag" and mugs labeled "Mug"? Did you know they did the same thing with buildings? The Rogers Park police station is living proof. In huge lowercase letters it reads, "police" on the wall nearest Clark. As if that could make up for the aggressively unattractive design. Maybe worse of all, it creates a huge windswept plaza along the most auto-dominated stretch of Clark. Optimistically there's a single bench. And what kind of trees were chosen for the plaza? Locust trees, whose most admirable quality is resistance to pollution.
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The reason there is only a single bench is that there used to be two of them until a few years ago, but a bus leaving the turn around went out of control, destroyed the bench & one of the plaza's light poles.
ReplyDeleteThe light was replaced, but not the bench.
The trees are the second set & I'm guessing that they will be replaced because the incompetents that run the city's General Services Dept. don't know that when a tree set in a grill grows larger, the cast iron grill is designed to have the inner sections scored & then broken off to let the tree get a bigger trunk!