How to retain urban architectural flava?

Cambridge House Diner, Chicago. Photo: Eli's Cheesecake.

Blair Kamin writes in the Chicago Tribune, "Urban renewal and the soul index: Make downtown vital, not sterile," from the article:

If you love cities and their endless array of flavors, both culinary and architectural, then last week was a lousy week.The Cambridge House, the no-nonsense Greek-owned diner off North Michigan Avenue, closed Monday. The Berghoff, the elegant old German restaurant in the Loop, shut down Tuesday. Two hits against old Chicago. The end for two locally owned and operated restaurants that ran against the tide of look-alike franchise eateries and coffee bars.With them go decades of history and memories, as well as treasured gathering places for their neighborhood and their city. Hello progress. Goodbye soul. Their loss hurts, even to the architect who designed the sleek, 26-story condo tower that will rise where the Cambridge House once stood....

Losing diversity, vitality

Ugh! There, in a nutshell, is the conflict that is wracking downtown Chicago: Call it gentrification, yuppification, corporatization, whatever. But the problem -- and, admittedly, it is the right problem to have, compared to downtown Detroit and other struggling Midwestern urban centers -- is this: Now that we've figured out how to get people to invest in downtown, how do we maintain its diversity and vitality so it doesn't become a sterile home for the super-rich? At issue is the survival of texture -- the urban texture that makes cities endlessly fascinating, quirky, exotic and even a little wicked....

"The reason we go to cities is for the ever-changing theater of the city. In a way, it's absent from those spaces. It's a corporate void," said Minneapolis architect Julie Snow, who brought her Harvard Graduate School of Design students to Chicago for an exercise in designing an urban hotel....

Resolving messy urban vitality and architectural grandeur is an eternal challenge. By rewarding developers with extra floor area in exchange for ground-level retail space and other public amenities, as Brininstool suggested, Chicago's new zoning law is likely to encourage urban character.

But in the end, character can't be manufactured or legislated or drawn up in some architectural recipe book. It comes from a long-simmering intermingling between a building and the human activity that goes on inside it. That was true even at Cambridge House, where the architecture was really non-architecture -- a simple, unpretentious space of counters, stools and tables that had no theme. It is what it is. Or rather, it was what it was. A real place. After last week's blows, we need more of them.

'Also see, "Cambridge House caught in the middle," from the Tribune as well.

"Once you're gone, you ain't never coming back..." Neil Young. Berghoff's Restaurant, Chicago. Photo from American Rail.

This pretty much already happened to DC. To those of us that are "new" here, and I've only been here 18+ years, we think of it as an antiseptic place, where McDonalds is the biggest purveyor of breakfast. DC had all those kinds of places, diners, seedy hotels, crazy nitespots. But they disappeared as the buildings that housed them were demolished in favor of bigger, newer office buildings. Much of "historic" downtown DC no longer exists. Therefore, the businesses are gone to (see Death and Life of Great American Cities and the discussion of the necessity for having a "large stock of old buildings" that cheerfully accomodate such uses).

Washington Cab Diner, matchbook cover. Source: Victorian Secrets.

Index Keywords: urban-revitalization