Odds and ends with some a bit odder than others:
Fresh face on Harrison: Looking to get the jump on all the many local business districts that host annual meetings — think appetizers, semi-optimistic speeches and uncontested elections to volunteer boards — the Oak Park Arts District is always first out of the January gate.
The Arts District meeting is so early in January, I’ve still got localton Kathy Griffin ringing in my ears from New Year’s Eve on CNN. “Anderson! What! No!!!”
The gathering last week at Trattoria 225 was ramped up from last year’s discouraging affair. This time there was no blizzard, temps were in the high 30s and the crowd was, actually, a crowd.
But I’d give most of the credit for the turnout to Mona Navitsky. She’s become the face of Harrison Street Ventures LLC, the somewhat mysterious entity formed to buy up the batch of empty commercial buildings sitting at the core of the district, mainly empty for decades and in foreclosure from the Kleronomos family.
I say mysterious only because, after our initial reporting, Ms. Navitsky acknowledged that somehow or other Chris Kleronomos wound up as a minority, silent partner in the deal. That’s worrisome.
However, to their credit, the new venture has been actively out in the neighborhood, assuring residents and fellow business owners that headway will be made this year in refilling empty spaces, that the plans are to use the existing buildings rather than demolition, and, ahead of the holidays, a whole lot of lovely lights and Christmas trees were placed in front of the glum, empty spaces, suggesting that someone gave a fig about how this whole stretch looked.
I met Ms. Navitsky at the Arts District meeting and she talked with enthusiasm about how much she likes Oak Park and the Arts District. In anticipation of better days just ahead, she earned her warm welcome.
Parking lot lament: We’ll all miss the world’s most expensive surface parking lot when developers actually start construction on the big old project on Lake Street, popularly known as the Colt Project. Great place to park if you want a bagel from Brueggers. And who doesn’t? Suppose you could park there if you wanted to get physically fit at FFC, too.
It is the most expensive parking lot in creation because, over the decades, the village government has paid millions and millions (and, yes, more millions) to assemble this plot of land which stretches from Lake to North Boulevard. To say the village government got bamboozled on a couple of the pieces of the puzzle would be very true.
In any event, villagers now own the land and we could not collectively ever feed enough quarters into the Pay Stations to have this make sense as a parking lot. No, we need 250 apartments, lots of commercial, and a parking garage for this to work.
Construction is due to start soon. But if you have actually parked in this lot recently — and, yes, I had a bagel over the weekend — you’d have noted that this cheaply-constructed, intended-as-temporary parking lot is rapidly turning into a roiling thrill ride of dips and divots. There is a sink hole here waiting to happen. So which happens first? Clark Street starts digging a foundation or we start losing Kias?
Quickly: Got a new phone plan on Sunday. That was fun. I’ve closed on mortgages faster. The young woman who handled this complex transaction was remarkably patient. And I am hopeful that, even after the hidden charges are added to the unhidden charges, I will have managed to drive my monthly cellphone bill somewhere in the vicinity of my car payment.
