Two years ago Manny Flores beat Jesse Granato in the race for alderman of the First Ward in part by campaigning against rampant development in East Village. Once in office Flores tried to freeze demolition permits, but city lawyers told him that was unconstitutional. Next he tried to downzone the area, but he was told there were already too many out-of-compliance buildings for it to qualify for a more restrictive zoning.
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On January 5 the city’s Commission on Chicago Landmarks tentatively approved the map of the East Village Landmark District, which includes 293 buildings. The commission will study the issues surrounding the creation of the district and sometime in the next few months make a final recommendation to the City Council on whether the district should be permanently adopted. Until then, all development within the district is frozen: no teardowns or even minor exterior alterations are allowed without the approval of the landmark commission, though property owners are allowed to make changes to interiors.
The landmark commission and the City Council will probably approve the district, because both bodies generally follow the local alderman’s lead. And so Flores has been hailed as a hero by preservationists and denounced as a tyrant by angry home owners. The debate has grown heated, and it’s hard to tell which side has the most support–signs favoring and opposing landmarking are visible in windows throughout the neighborhood.
The west side of East Village does indeed have the highest concentration of old buildings. But there are still nice ones on the east side that are worth protecting. On Marshfield, Hermitage, and Paulina between Division and Chicago, old buildings still outnumber new ones by two to one, and many of them are indistinguishable from or superior to houses in the proposed protected areas. They just happen to be on the wrong side of a line on a map.
Kuster and other opponents of the proposed district are asking that Flores put it to a binding vote of local residents. Flores responds that a vote is unnecessary, because he’s soliciting opinions at public meetings.
