Category Archives: Chicago

Touchvision ends with a proud legacy

Chicago, Media, ,

touchvisionYesterday, the staff of Touchvision was informed our company would be shutting down, effective immediately. A bunch of my fantastic and talented colleagues are looking for work today so if you need writers, producers, editors or any other kind of content-slingers, I got a list for you.

A little more than a year ago, Justin Allen – a guy I’d briefly worked with on a video series for Chicago magazine – said he was rebooting the two-year-old company into a place that allowed for creative risks and asked if I wanted to join as the editorial director. For someone who looks for fun and creative challenges in his work, it was perfect. Plus, I got to work with Jessica Galliart again who makes everything she touches better. (Hire her.)

This piece in Crain’s by Lynne Marek talks about what it was like to turn around that company. I give her an enormous amount of credit for getting what we were about and digging into what we do.

While its end may suggest we didn’t succeed (media critic Robert Feder calls it a “noble failure” and says we did “a lot of good work”), I’ll say here that a company trying to move from a traditional TV model to one informed by digital and social media has a lot of challenges. We just ran out of time. Maybe the task was greater than us. But we worked our asses off trying. We had a lot of support from our board and our investors, too.

I still think something like this can work and make money. Touchvision’s end and the shutdown of Al Jazeera America’s TV outlet may seem like a counterargument but I’d point you to its digital arm, AJ+. They do excellent work in the vein of what we were doing at Touchvision and have had a lot of success with it.

Feel free to skip the rest of this if you like but I don’t want to wrap this without calling out some of the excellent things that Touchvision created in little more than a year and would not have been possible without someone like Justin at the helm and many talented people behind-the-scenes.

(Click these links now because I’m not sure how long they will be around).

On my first day, I saw a preview of a feature we did on cleaning up a former meth house. It’s bracing and sad but I knew then that this was a place that was capable of wonderful things.

One of the first things I helped produce was this four-part (!!!) series on Uber and its effects on the economy. If anything, the issues we raised there have become even more prevalent since then. (Check me out in part 4 as I moderate a discussion between our two producers and briefly fulfill my dream to host a news and civic affairs show!)

We also did a great job at making TV seem more like the Internet. This daily news series called Speaking of News started on the live streaming platform Periscope. I’d point an iPhone at the incomparable Molly Adams while she sat in our company’s kitchen talking about whatever important stories and angles she felt were being ignored that day. It evolved into this shot-in-the-newsroom show mainly made for Facebook and YouTube and aired in a shortened form on our daily TV show.

Using that model, we launched another Periscope show called We Should Talk About This with Gwen Purdom and Erik Niewiarowski. It was pop culture-focused and would run for fifteen minutes on Periscope while a three minute version ran on YouTube, Facebook and TV. The show was a joy to watch because of Gwen and Erik’s incredible chemistry and really hit its stride when Gwen brought in a stuffed deer head to hang in the background.

WE PRODUCED A TV SHOW WITH A STUFFED DEER HEAD IN THE BACKGROUND.

Also worth noting here that WSTAT was produced every day by our social and digital producer Angie Jaime. For years, I’ve been in places that talked a good game but never quite empowered their social/digital teams to make, produce and improve our content. I’m really glad we did and we were the better for it.

We had one of the best social commentators anywhere in Felonious Munk. You’ll see more of him soon as he’s already appeared on The Nightly Show. Working with him on his pieces was always a highlight of my day.

Plus, our docs team – run by Lauren Mialki – did some of the most beautiful, moving work you’ll ever see. A look at youth affected by Chicago violence, a profile of a guy who runs The First Church of Marijuana and what it’s like to be a 25-year-old with cancer. Our special projects group, under the guidance of Julie Svetcoff, cranked out new, experimental projects every week with some of the best comedians in Chicago.

We did long pieces of cultural analysis, we talked about Internet harassment, we had series on everything from science and psychology to marijuana to cocktails to bullying to gender issues.

Every single day we produced a morning news show (with headlines, culture and business news) and figured out how to make it work as social media content.

And we held a Chewbacca impersonation contest.

That’s just a few highlights. We got to hire and work with people I’d long admired. Every single day, I was stunned a place existed that was doing this kind of work and my team and I were a part of it.

I say all this not to brag on us too much but to tell you that there are some peerlessly talented people out there looking for work. And anyone who tells you it’s not possible to run a high-caliber media company in Chicago is trying to sell you something. We had some pretty solid plans for how to make money at it, too.
And if you’d like to know how…well, I have some time on my hands and I know some other folks who do, too. Get at me.

Mark Kirk has a very specific image of the South Side

Chicago, Politics, Race, ,

Image: Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mark Kirk of Illinois celebrates at election night rally in WheelingThis week, Illinois Senator Mark Kirk referred to Lindsey Graham – an unmarried Presidential candidate – as “a bro with no ho.” He further intimated “that’s what we’d say on the South Side.” (Kirk was born in Champaign, IL and is a resident of Highland Park, IL where the median income is $108,393.)

The Washington Post heard that second sentence as “on the street.” Either way, it found “bro with no ho” is not in colloquial use on the South Side or anywhere else and is likely something Kirk made up.

It’s tempting to think of this as a one-off remark from an out-of-touch white guy who’s trying to adopt an urban patois that both enhances his cred while simultaneously critiquing the language patterns of a lower socioeconomic population.

In fact, it’s a pattern of Kirk’s who clearly sees the black neighborhoods as a wasteland of violence and corruption.

Back in April, he referred to “the black community” as “the one we drive faster through.

Then there was the time in 2013 when Kirk said he wanted to spend $500 million dollars to have federal agents roll into South Side neighborhoods and round up gang members:

The freshman Republican senator visited Englewood as part of a deal with Chicago Democratic congressman Bobby Rush to help smooth over tensions from earlier this year.  In May, Kirk proposed spending $500 million in federal funds to arrest 18,000 members of the Gangster Disciples street gang as a solution to combat violence. Rush responded that Kirk’s idea was an “upper-middle-class, elitist white boy solution to a problem he knows nothing about.” [SNIP] Kirk responded: “Oftentimes when people say you cannot police your way out of this, I would say thank God that Illinois and Chicago didn’t believe that. We could’ve just let Al Capone run the whole place.” The audience scoffed at the decades-old crime reference and tried to explain street crime to Kirk.

At least then he actually toured the neighborhood instead of hitting the gas when he approached it.

As Kirk approaches a re-election fight, it’s also worth remembering the time in 2010 when he said he wanted to “voter integrity” monitors to the South and West sides because Democrats would be likely to “jigger the numbers somewhat” there. Nevermind that voter fraud of this nature barely exists and such tactics are usually intended to suppress minority voter turnout.

So it was interesting to hear Kirk proudly wear the mantle of the South Side this week when he so often seems to want nothing to do with it.

My top 10 favorite moments at Chicagoist on its 10th anniversary

Chicago, Media, ,

Chicagoist – a site I succinctly describe to the uninitiated as “a news and culture blog about Chicago” – chicago-istlaunched about ten-and-a-half years ago under editors Margaret Lyons and Rachelle Bowden with the backend marketing and infrastructure support of the Gothamist network (which at the time was just two sites). The site’s just getting around to celebrating this milestone tonight and I’ve been in full throwback mode all day. (I’ve been tweeting reflections and stories on Twitter under #Chicagoist10).

It may seem unremarkable now but at the time there were few sites trying to talk about the news the way the average twenty/thirtysomething person talked about the news. In Chicago, there was Chicagoist, Gapers Block (the older brother competition who always made us try to work harder), Eric Zorn’s blog and a handful of others mostly focused on specific topics. Chicagoist and Gapers were the only two group blogs I recall that tried to cover the whole city. (Red Eye, Chicago magazine, Time Out Chicago and the dailies were still very focused on their print products.) We didn’t always succeed in our efforts to cover all of Chicago, in part because Chicagoist had a downtown/North Side bias running through it for its first couple of years. This angered native Chicagoans (and oddly some transplants, too) but it also meant the site had a voice, the voice of someone moving into the city for the first time and discovering it. And as the site grew older that voice become more authoritative and it grew into its aspirations without losing the barroom skepticism that ran through it in the early days.

I started there as a music and movies writer, a few months after the site launched. This was my first audition post. (It is nothing special.) I left as a co-editor in 2007 to go work at Time Out Chicago. Chicagoist was an incredible training ground for writers who wanted to develop. Many of us wrote for free. We weren’t really editing each other early on. SEO and social-driven audiences were non-existent. So the site was often a mix of in-jokes, minor happenstances and hobby horses. I can’t count the number of times favorite movie quotes of mine became headlines. But it was also a chance to figure out who you were as a writer. And get better at it. Or to create a newsroom environment even though we all worked remotely. We even managed to throw the occasional event or five. It was legit to say that blog had a community around it. I still read the comments in those days.

It was also a time when there were few alternate sources of news and viewpoints on the same. Again, unfathomable if you’ve grown up in a media ecosystem, post-2010. When the dailies or other media sources did something dumb, sexist or short-sighted, we wrote about it. I know how trite this sounds now, but it was what made me proud to write for them. Scroll down to the “Special thanks to” section here and you can see all the folks who made the site what it’s been.

I owe most of my current career to getting my start there. So do many others. It’s also where I met my wife. So in some ways, I owe it everything.

Here are ten of my most memorable moments – nine good ones and one when I got a little over my skis.

10. The Dave Matthews poop bus stories
All the Chicagoist writers had their way with this legendary story of a DMB tour bus dropping its toilet after-products into the Chicago River. I took particular glee in it. We retired the topic here but it still gets referenced whenever fecal matter is involved.

9. Interviews and festival coverage
We started doing coverage of summer music festivals in 2005 when Lollapalooza returned. The first year we were still small so I just ran around Lolla with a digital camera, a notebook and a tape recorder. Other local sites would follow the wall-to-wall model as the music festival scene took off with Intonation and Pitchfork. But Chicagoist still does it best years later even as social media has changed the way live events get covered.

Chicagoist is also where I learned to interview people whether they were bands, filmmakers, authors, a friend of mine who was a ballerina and a burlesque dancer. Most importantly, I interviewed the guys behind Filmspotting (nee Cinecast), a show I guest-co-hosted a couple of times, which remains a highlight of my life in media.

Speaking of interviews…

8. WBEZ’s decision to drop jazz
It’s ironic how hard I went after WBEZ here since I’ve ended up appearing on its airwaves many times since as a panelist, which would not be possible without this switch. After I did this post, its VP of comms asked me if he could respond so we ran this Q&A.

7. The Get Well Roger project
When Roger Ebert first became ill, the staff crowdsourced a simple photo project: People uploading and tagging photos of themselves giving the thumbs-up.

6. That time I kinda fucked up
I hated Tucker Max. Still do. I count as a career highlight the time I was editor of Playboy.com and told his publicist we would never cover him as long as I was editor (which didn’t last long but still). But I didn’t do my homework on this one and the whole reason for it – Tucker Max supposedly operating a site under a pseudonym – was taken down hard in the comments (deservedly so) by people with more awareness of him than I had at the time. The rest of the post is sort of useless (though still true) without it. But he was in an ascendant period here and it felt important to talk about that. The world would eventually tire of his shenanigans.

5. Ctrl-Alt-Rock 1 and 2
We threw two local band showcases thanks in large part to the booking prowess of Jim “Tankboy” Kopeny. Ctrl-Alt-Rock was the name coined by our sports writer Benjy Lipsman. The first packed the house at Schuba’s. The second was at Double Door and was one of the last things I did with the site before leaving for Time Out Chicago. The second is my favorite because I convinced Jim we should book the Reptoids and a little band of U of C students no one had heard of called The Passerines.

4. The Double Door is closing hearing in which nothing happened 
Everyone freaked out because the Double Door might close. An online petition was launched. I went to to the hearing. The response to the loss of a great rock club forced the two sides to come to an agreement. I wrote this post because I sat in a courtroom for hours and wanted to make it worth something.

3. Guilting Pitchfork/Intonation into letting people bring in their own water
It is always ridiculously hot during Chicago’s festival season. The fest that would become Pitchfork Fest had a stupid policy of not allowing people to bring their own water. But their reaction to questions about it was what really irked me so I wrote this. Two days later the fest reversed its decision and allowed people to bring in their own water, a rule most summer festivals here now follow.

2. Questioning NBC 5’s ethics
I don’t know why this bothered me so much. Maybe because our site had a more stringent ethics policy for food reporting than a major television affiliate.

1. The Richard Marx letters
It’s pretty much standard for Richard Marx to go after someone in Chicago media when they do something he doesn’t like. My errors were minor to non-existent depending on your read of this. This was the first time I heard from a legitimately famous person I wrote about and it was a little weird. Justin Kaufmann and I later immortalized those emails in this live Schadenfreude sketch:

No one waits in line at Hot Doug’s for a hot dog

Chicago, Uncategorized,

One of the worst things about Internet culture in the last five years is its tendency to mock the unfettered joy of others. Someone’s always there to remind you there is some atrocity you should be rending your garments over instead of just…being…in-between the decisions that keep you up at night.

All this brings me to the line at Hot Doug’s.

hotdougsLet me make this clear because it seems to have escaped notice: Hot Doug’s is not, at its core, about hot dogs. And people do not wait in line at Hot Doug’s because they are interested solely in consuming a hot dog.

Hot Doug’s is both simple and complex. Simply, they are encased meats. Here’s where it gets complicated: I have never, during a visit, spent more time dining inside Hot Doug’s than I have waiting outside in its line. I would argue this is true for most people. So what happens in the line is as important as what happens when you sit down to eat.

This is why people who are selling their spots on Craigslist for hundreds of dollars are missing the point entirely.

I don’t blame people who have never been to Hot Doug’s for thinking a long wait in line for a place is bullshit. In any other case, I’d agree with them. But I’ve waited in line at Hot Doug’s for an hour in ten degree weather and been happy to do it.

We live in a world that is trying to eliminate any shared physical experience. The movies, the theater and the line at Hot Doug’s feel like the last semblances of humanity’s group project. (There is no line at Kuma’s. You put your name in and find a space of your own to wait.)

I’ve never had a bad experience in a Hot Doug’s line. Every time I expected someone would, for example, ignore the signs about keeping the doors in the vestibule closed on a winter’s day? Never happened. People want to be in that line so there’s a shared sense of responsibility.

Here’s why people waite in line at Hot Doug’s:

– Because the guy that owns the place has been standing longer than you (until this week, anyway). And he’s standing there to take your order. With a smile. And a warm greeting. And a reminder that you should just get the small drink instead of the large because it’s free refills.

– Have you ever had to wait for a table at Hot Doug’s? I haven’t. Do you know why? Because Doug Sohn and his team are wizards. I placed my order and miraculously – every time! – there’s a table waiting for me and however many friends I came in with. Doug knows exactly how long to make small talk with you and everyone else in line to make things run smoothly.

– Doug Sohn is the only person in Chicago to incur a fine for selling foie gras. Not Charlie Trotter who made it a thing. The little guy who owns the sausage stand on the corner of Roscoe and California. However you feel about foie gras aside, here is an example of an average guy telling grandstanding politicians to take a flying leap and getting pasted on the chin for it.

– If you are in line at closing time, you get a seat.

– The specials this week include salsa verde wild boar sausage with chipotle dijonaise, jalapeno bacon and smoked gouda and escargot and guanciale sausage with parsley-garlic butter and camebert cheese for nine bucks each and if you want gourmet food on that level anyplace else in Chicago it will cost you three times as much.

– This:

People waited in line at Hot Doug’s because all of this matters. And they voted with their feet. They said they wanted this to remain and were willing to put in the time necessary to make it happen.

So you, guardian of the free time of others, who mocked those folks who were waiting in line at Hot Doug’s?

They had more fun than you.

Confusing the symptoms of Chicago’s violence with the disease

Chicago, Media, Politics, Race

7452178210_4424a362a0_mI swear this blog isn’t going to become “Our Man In Chicago On Crime” but it’s probably going to be on my mind for a couple weeks.

I’m trying to understand the mayor’s mindset when he does things like this:

Emanuel attended an anti-violence vigil in Roseland Monday evening where he said everyone — from parents to police to federal lawmakers — must play a role to curb bloodshed in Chicago.

“A lot of people will say where were the police … and that’s a fair question, but not the only question,” Emanuel said. “Where are the parents? Where is the community?

First of all, I don’t know how you stand there at a anti-violence rally in a community that lost one of its own in a drive-by shooting two nights prior and ask “Where is the community?” That takes some gall.

I also don’t know how you read about the father of the 14-year-old boy shot in a separate incident and ask “Where are the parents?”

“What happens to kids when they’re not with their parents?” said Susan Diaz, whose daughter married into the Rios family. “The kid was 14 years old. The parents do the best that they can. When the kid walks away — he goes to school, the beach, the park, the library — the gangbangers are hanging around waiting to recruit them. … That’s just the way it is.”

When the mayor asks “Where are the parents? Where are the communities?” it implies neither exists where there is gun violence. That’s reductive. And wrong. Especially when the underpinnings of those communities have been ripped apart by lack of economic investment. Gun violence doesn’t start because a kid wakes up and decides not to listen to his parents. It starts when he thinks a gun keeps him alive. And that happens when crime seems like the best – and safest – possible way to earn a living and keep on living.

More police aren’t going to solve the problem. But pointing a finger at parents without talking about why parents aren’t around? Or the economic reasons why parents alone aren’t enough to shout down the other voices kids hear on those streets every day? Not helpful.

When you’re the mayor, your rhetoric frames the way people view a situation. Your words make headlines, they lead the evening news. Demonizing an entire community gives fuel to those who think “those people” are all criminals. It lays the blame for crime at the community’s collective feet, helps keep “them” at arm’s length and convinces people that crime is something that exists in other neighborhoods and won’t affect them.

I’m reminded of last week’s shooting in Lakeview:

The Pride parade revelers who had filled the street earlier were gone, Lane said, and a younger crowd replaced them.

“I doubt any of them was over 30,” Lane said. “A lot of them don’t live around here. They come from other neighborhoods. It’s just the attitude they have, the mentality.”

[snip]

Neighbor Juan Chavez, who’s lived in the area since 2007, said “the majority of people who cause trouble don’t live in the neighborhood.”

People in “safe” Chicago neighborhoods really will go to great lengths to convince themselves that crime isn’t a problem where they live. Saying “they come from other neighborhoods” suggests there’s a leaky faucet of crime you can just turn off and fix the problem.

Instead, we – all of us – need to support crime prevention and economic improvement efforts for all Chicago neighborhoods. Not just our own. That’s not easy, I’ll admit. But it’s the cause of the problem, not a lack of morality or parents or community.

Or to put it another way: morality, parents and community are what get infected by the disease of violence and poverty.

Image via Don Harder/Creative Commons

In the wake of more Techweek sexism, it’s time for Chicago to speak up

Chicago, Internet, ,

I have a guest op-ed in Crain’s Chicago Business about the sexist imagery that Techweek has been using to promote its event.

There’s a lot of context here – it’s not just about Techweek and gave me an opportunity some other things I’ve seen in Chicago’s STEM communities in the last year.

Please go read it in full at Crain’s.  But here’s the call to action at the end:

The responsibility of inclusiveness is borne by everyone, not just Techweek. I’d love to see other Chicago tech events like Built In Chicago, Tech Cocktail and Technori create their own codes of conduct and describe how they will enforce them when they are violated. (The Geek Feminism Wiki offers some good open-source language as a starting point.) Writers and editors of lists featuring local tech luminaries should move beyond the VCs and the C-suiters (who are invariably older, male and white) and showcase the people in the trenches who have much more to do with the code that gets written and the products that get released. Funders should look for opportunities to bankroll women-led companies and incubators — 1871’s FEMTech is an example.

Finally, if you’re a man at a tech program, startup or publication that doesn’t demonstrate inclusion of women or people or color or deliberately uses policies, language or imagery that excludes, speak up.

A community determines what it will tolerate and creates policy to reinforce its beliefs. Now is the time for Chicago’s entire tech community to speak loudly about both.

UPDATE: A few links and events of note since I wrote the above:

* Techweek Chicago held a roundtable discussion about the controversy. They claimed to do so with “the support of Ms. Tech,” a woman-led tech/business group in Chicago but a subsequent story in the Sun-Times said the head of the organization “wasn’t briefed after Wednesday’s round-table despite Techweek organizers telling her she and her organization would be involved in the next action steps.” During the roundtable, the organizers decided to cancel the Black Tie Rave but still donate the expected proceeds to charity. They also created a “fellowship program” so that 50 women could attend Techweek Chicago without having to pay the admission fee. I’m not sure why you’d want to attend an event that doesn’t appear to have your best interests in mind, even if it was for free. At this point, Techweek appears to be trying to buy influence and align themselves with people – like Ms. Tech – who will make them seem interested in solving their problems.

* Melissa Pierce, a prominent figure in Chicago’s tech community, wrote an op-ed for Crain’s detailing how she was “duped” in her participation in last year’s Techweek conference.

* Huffington Post Chicago has a good roundup with commentary from local voices in Chicago tech.

* I didn’t realize it until later but apparently Moshe Tamssot was Patient Zero in this whole thing.

Of antennae, pizza, the French and Goats: What’s worth fighting for in Chicago?

Chicago, Media, , , , ,

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Chicago points of pride, both real and imagined. How upset you got over these slights depends on whether you see Chicago as a real place or some kind of carnival ride. Based on our collective reaction, it’s sometimes tough to tell the difference.

First, there was the Sears/Willis Tower losing its status as the world’s tallest building because of an antenna. This one’s in the carnival ride category. New York has a bigger antenna, we have a higher occupied floor. At this point, it’s almost a literal dick-measuring contest and it does not behoove us to separate fly shit from pepper, as my mom used to say. You could maybe argue there’s a real economic loss here due to the possible tourism dollars that flow into a city with the tallest building in the U.S. but since we long ago lost the title of tallest building in the world it always struck me as a bit of a booby prize.

Besides, everyone knows the view at the Hancock is better anyway.

Then there was the whole “Jon Stewart insulted our deep dish pizza” thing, which is really just an outgrowth of the tallest building thing so come on now. It was a master class in trolling as Stewart drew Chicago in a gloriously caricatured sketch. Mayor Emanuel added his own flourish with a faux tough guy response, mailing a dead fish to Stewart – the fish, in this case, being anchovies on top of a pizza. Again, a carnival ride.

Besides, everyone knows the best Chicago pizza is served on a thin crust and cut into squares.

A better man than me, Chicago Tribune‘s Phil Rosenthal, sums up the above thusly:

Civic pride should be a knowing grin, not a battle cry. It’s the world stage on which Chicago wants to play, not some Montessori schoolyard. You are how you beef.

Speaking of the world stage, let’s discuss the French travel advisory which states its tourists may want to avoid the South and West Sides. You’d think this one could be easily dismissed with a Jerry Lewis joke, but no.

One one hand, there’s obvious ignorance at work here and ignorance should be mocked, whenever possible. Leave it to the inventors of the Maginot Line to determine that everything north of 59th Street is A-OK just because the Museum of Science and Industry and Hyde Park are down that way. But even arguing that point reinforces the idea that some neighborhoods should be avoided, that they are unsafe, that they should be left to rot. Just this week, Gapers Block published a post that deftly sums up this ignorance that makes it all too easy for some to decide kids in Englewood are animals.

Yet French idiocy is somewhat useful here. If anything, it demonstrates there are real problems on much of the South and West sides of the city and we aren’t dealing with them well at all. Those problems start at home though so let’s worry less about what the French think and more about why most of us are fine with taking the Dan Ryan to head south through the city but would avoid Wentworth Avenue at all costs. If we’re going to silently endorse the mindset of the French, we don’t get to be upset about it. Especially the mayor. *

Finally, there’s the likely (perhaps temporary) move of the Billy Goat Tavern (nee Billy Goat Inn) from its cozy, dark corner of lower Michigan Avenue. At first blush, this is a carnival ride issue.

It’s the place from the Saturday Night Live sketch! Royko drank there! And they put the curse on the Cubs! That’s Chicago history! 

All of those things are true and they’re worth preserving, in some way. Perhaps in a museum. But it’s not why it’s important for the Billy Goat to remain a vibrant part of Chicago’s downtown.

For some, the Goat’s as much a caricature of Chicago culture as deep-dish pizza: a tourist trap with lousy, overpriced burgers or a calcified tribute to the greatness of Old White Guy Journalism. And for those reasons, we should be glad to see it go. But these are folks who haven’t been to the Goat in a while – if ever – or have been there during lunch when it’s all too easy to bump elbows with, well, French tourists.

The key to understanding why the Goat remains worth fighting for is knowing The Goat at, say, 7pm or 10am is far different from the Goat at noon or 5pm. In the off-hours, you’ll see cops, construction workers and, yes, a couple of journalists. As someone who’s eaten there recently, I can tell you the burgers are a helluva lot better – and cheaper – than most of what you’ll find nearby (though too much bun for my taste). It’s still a place where you can find – in the words of my friend, Chicago Tribune reporter James Janega – “a bit of the realest Chicago I know…A credit to our future and this city’s value. [A reminder] of who you were comfortable being.”

A bar that serves a blue-collar customer in the basement of the National Association of Realtors building is literally underground subversion and that’s what Chicago – especially downtown Chicago which is too often given to showering developers with TIF funds intended for the city’s neighborhoods – still needs. The original Billy Goat Inn opened in 1934 on West Madison, near the old Chicago Stadium (itself replaced by the United Center which went on to create more Chicago history). In 1964 – post-curse but pre-SNL – the Goat moved to a tony Michigan Avenue address but lost nothing of what made it essential to Chicago.

I would prefer the Goat remain intact in its current location. But if the will of real estate developers means that can’t happen and we need to create the Billy Goat Mark III, let’s remember the great Chicago architect’s words “form follows function.” It’s more important to have a place off Michigan Avenue where people can still feel “comfortable being” instead of wringing our hands because you won’t ever hear cheezbooga, cheezbooga again (though I acknowledge the revenue from the latter probably allows for the former). Picture frames, old tables and chairs and tap handles can be moved with all their worn corners intact – if it can happen with Miller’s Pub**, it can happen with the Goat. But their use needs to continue. Move it, yes, but not behind glass lest the Goat turn into an amusement park like its namesake on Navy Pier.

Chicago needs to maintain its active third places to preserve its history and its future. It might keep us from having to pitch fits over pizza casserole and antennas and help us maintain the communities we have instead of abandoning them and letting the French pretend they don’t exist.

* After I wrote the above (but before I published it) Chicago Tribune‘s Mary Schmich pointed out Chicago’s tourism board doesn’t exactly endorse the South and West sides as tourist destinations. 

** Thanks to NBC Ward Room’s political columnist Mark Anderson for the above link.

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