Why read about a couple of Chicago streets, inhabited by a few of the city’s most affluent families? Shouldn’t we, when there are so many compelling tragedies, so many dramatic feats of heroism to report, leave the exploration of this tiny, wealthy pocket of the 43rd Ward to People magazine and its ilk? Are we simply indulging in real estate pornography?
Perhaps, but there’s also part of us that argues it’s a newspaper’s responsibility to chronicle transformations as they happen. One can walk along beleaguered Prairie Avenue or elegant Astor Street and understand how those streets evolved over time because their history has been duly recorded. We hope this week’s cover story, “Flaunting it,” will provide another piece of that record.
Tribune business reporter Susan Chandler has written about money in Chicago for more than two decades, at the Chicago Sun-Times and the Tribune. Over the years, wandering through Lincoln Park’s farmers’ market, she witnessed the neighborhood’s real estate boom-and wondered what was going on. She was stupefied, she says, by “the sheer number of houses under construction, the size of the new houses, the over-ornamentation on some of them. . . . If the real estate economy is slowing down, you can’t tell it by looking there.”
Susan dug for public documents often hidden from view and reached out to longtime neighborhood residents. “They own their homes,” she mused, “but have lost control of their environment.”
Architecture critic Blair Kamin doesn’t just look at buildings. Blair, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, has a gift for understanding how people interact with the world. “An architecture critic’s role is to open people’s eyes to the built-as opposed to natural-environment. In this case, that means assessing not just stand-alone houses but their collective impact on public space.”
We may think of our homes as private sanctuaries, but they are also part of a shared environment. Just something we all should keep in mind.
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etaylor@tribune.com
