White Palace Shootout!

I have a small bone to pick with the Sun-Times: since when is Canal and Roosevelt the "West Loop"?



Duck!

You have obviously confused the Sun-Times with a newspaper. It's OK, it's a common mistake. Once upon a time it was a great paper, then this guy from Australia came and . . .

sundevilpeg wrote:since when is Canal and Roosevelt the "West Loop"?

Since the 1920s, when the University of Chicago defined the 77 official Chicago Community Areas. While I agree that there's probably a better description of this neighborhood, it is technically in the western part of the Loop CA, no. 32.

Because nearly every CA is divided into smaller, less official named neighborhoods, some of whom also bear the same name, it can be confusing to know just which bondaries someone's using. The Loop's a particularly puzzling case, since some people use it to mean the area circled by the L tracks, some as a generic reference to downtown or the central business district, some the CA. Another confusing name is Lincoln Park, which can mean the park, the neighborhood just adjoining the park, or the CA, which stretches as far west as the Chicago River.

LAZ wrote:

sundevilpeg wrote:since when is Canal and Roosevelt the "West Loop"?

Since the 1920s, when the University of Chicago defined the 77 official Chicago Community Areas. While I agree that there's probably a better description of this neighborhood, it is technically in the western part of the Loop CA, no. 32.

No. The Loop area, in this scheme, is bounded on the west by the Chicago River and on the south by Roosevelt. The White Palace Grill is west of the river.

If it's not the "West Loop," what is is called? I don't recollect.

Neighborhood names have become fluid; changes are commonplace from what I'm seeing. I lived in Uptown for a while. One day I awoke to see a sign erected by condo-converters next door to me describing the neighborhood "Clarendon Gardens." I now live in "West Ridge," and my neighbors are offended when I slip and call it "West Rogers Park."

The "West Loop" designation is now being applied, from what I see/hear, by many people to the area as far west as Ashland Avenue - from Lake St. on the North, to the Eisenhower Expw. on the South. Including the White Palace intersection does seem a bit of a stretch.

Well, under the community areas system, Roosevelt and Canal is part of the Near West Side: roughly Grand south to 18th St; the river west to Western.

Here is an image from the Tribune's real estate search page:


Of course, as noted above, the "official" designation deals only in very large areas and doesn't answer the question of what people actually call a given, smaller, neighborhood.

My favorite example of neighborhood mis-labelling was a condo complex in the 500 block of South Clinton that a few years ago was claiming to be "Printers Row lofts".

Since the 1920s, when the University of Chicago defined the 77 official Chicago Community Areas.

What made the University of Chicago's effort "official"? Did the city commission or otherwise endorse that effort?

More to the point, as Bill pointed out, neighborhood names are fluid. This seems to be particularly so as developers (not to mention residents) seek to relabel gentrifying (or hopefully gentrifying) neighborhoods or simply to replace labels that have acquired connotations considered (by some) to be "unfortunate."

And, to return to sundevilpeg's original point: is the Sun-Times unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge that, even if the city gave its imprimatur to the 1920s designations, times change?

Gypsy Boy

I think the U of C names were in common use for many years, and fit the city fairly well for a time. Over time they became less descriptive of certain cohesive areas, with the result that no resident of one portion of North Center, say, would call himself a resident of North Center-- he lives in St. Ben's; and (as the West Rogers Park example shows) the names also became attached to less than desirable reputations. Which is why real estate folks in particular abuse more desirable terms like Lakeview to encompass areas which haven't had a view of a lake since the Pleistocene, and invented such things as RANCH (Racine-Armitage-North-Clybourn-Halsted, which was supposed to indicate an area on the dangerous frontiers of Old Town/Lincoln Park where, IF you stayed carefully within those boundaries, you might live to see the next sunrise and even, more daringly, a tiny amount of property appreciation someday).

The post is now pretty well buried in Useful Stuff, but it links to the City of Chicago Web Site with the official community maps. With all the conjecture about what is in what community, looking up is easy. There are PDF files for each community as well as aggregates by name or number. The city site does give clear indication that these are official.

The pluses for the community designations are that every part of the city is in one and only one official community while official statistics have been compiled on this basis for over 70 years. The negatives are that the definitions are old, some places don't fit very well anywhere and some areas were split among several communities (for example, the former town of Ravenswood, which had been incorporated into Chicago long before the community maps were designed). Somewhat mixed in effect is the propensity to set dividing lines on major streets, railroad tracks and bodies of water. These things are all fairly effective barriers, but having opposite sides of the same street in two communities has some bizarre consequences.

Because many of these communities are fairly large, smaller albeit unofficial area designations are common. Parish lines and individual subdivisions are pretty common.

Unfortunately, real estate brokers are notoriously sloppy in characterizing locations when entering listings or in advertising. Search on ZIP code in realtor.com, and you can find a lot of errors. Close to home was the tendency to stretch North Center almost to the Old Town School of Folk Music a few years ago and then to stretch Lincoln Square to around 4200 north more recently as fads changed. The dividing line was Montrose (4400 north) the whole time, but you wouldn't know it from real estate ads.

Amata wrote:The Loop area, in this scheme, is bounded on the west by the Chicago River and on the south by Roosevelt. The White Palace Grill is west of the river.

Yes, I see that now that I've looked at a regular map. Probably the Sun-Times reporter did the same thing I did -- looked at the neighborhood map and guesstimated where Canal was relative to the river. That's clearly wrong and reporters are supposed to do better than that, though with the exigencies of short deadlines and understaffing, I can understand why a harried writer might not take time to compare the maps.

It's not only the Sun-Times*; every paper in town makes errors of this nature.

Gypsy Boy wrote:Is the Sun-Times unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge that, even if the city gave its imprimatur to the 1920s designations, times change?

The point of these official Community Areas -- and they are official and in current use by the city, the Census Bureau and others -- is that the boundaries do not change. They are not influenced by fluctuation in real estate values. Since the unofficial names and borders often change depending on whether one's buying or selling and are always subject to argument, use of official, unchanging boundaries has its appeal.

Bill wrote:The "West Loop" designation is now being applied, from what I see/hear, by many people to the area as far west as Ashland Avenue - from Lake St. on the North, to the Eisenhower Expw. on the South.

I think what's happening there is that the neighborhood association serving the area once called West Loop Gate has called itself the West Loop Community Organization and is dropping the "Gate" part of the name.

*Disclosure: I've sold two freelance articles to the Sun-Times.

LAZ wrote:I think what's happening there is that the neighborhood association serving the area once called West Loop Gate has called itself the West Loop Community Organization and is dropping the "Gate" part of the name.

I've been lobbying for this for quite some time. The use of Gate in the name made me think of Nixon. Now that I have finally left the area, I guess they decided they no longer needed the Gate in the name because they no longer had to irritate me. If you look at how that community is developing, the fact that they are now claiming territory all the way to Ashland isn't much of a stretch.