Shops altering pavements must pay for restoration

For pedestrians, navigating the city's footpaths is no easy task. One has to watch out for broken paver blocks, flower pots, and of course the parts where the footpath disappears altogether to make way for entrances to shops. Hopefully, all this will soon change, with the BMC announcing a crackdown on all shops and eateries that make alterations to footpaths.

From now on, if a shop or restaurant makes minor modifications to the pavement, the altered portion will be demolished by the BMC and the original pavement will be restored. "If the changes are minor, like a staircase encroaching on the pavement, BMC will demolish it. But if they make major changes, the shop will have to bear the entire cost of the restoration work," said a senior civic official.

The move has come after increasing complaints about shops destroying parts of the pavement to install marble tiles marking their entrances, inconveniencing pedestrians and violating BMC rules.According to officials, while the facade of a shop can be changed, civic norms do not permit changes to the footpath outside the shops. "There are many shops which remove paver blocks laid by the BMC and put their own tiles to suit the shop. This often leads to loosening of the paver blocks of the entire stretch," said the official.

For pedestrians, this is a major hazard. "Footpaths are public property. They cannot be modified. People often slip on the marble flooring and such alterations change the level of that part of the footpath, due to which people can trip and fall. There are stretches where an entire part has been redone by shop owners. Hawkers are already occupying the pavements reducing walking space, but the quality of footpaths is one thing that cannot be compromised," he added.

"I have seen several shops which have tiled the entire pavement, starting from their entrance to the road. Shops should also not be allowed to build ramps on pavements," said Nihil Jain, a Dadar resident.During its 'Talk the Walk' campaign, Mirror had consistently highlighted the issue of the lack of walking space in the city. Municipal Commissioner Sitaram Kunte had admitted that pedestrians were not the top priority of planners, but had promised that the BMC would try to make the city more pedestrian-friendly.

Back in 1983, when he was interviewed for the Art Institute's Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Edo Belli, the most important Chicago architect you've probably never heard of, told a charming story about how he became the chosen architect for the archdiocese of Chicago and wound up designing Uptown's Cuneo Hospital and scads of other Catholic institutions in the city and beyond.Cuneo Hospital is that big,I'm looking at getting the light bar from ford racing and was wondering who sells the Shun Stone Marble Tiles. glassy sweep of a building that curves around the corner of Montrose and Clarendon, looking like the grandpap of 333 West Wacker. The subject of a recently issued demolition permit, it's in imminent danger, which is why I'm mentioning itbut I'm getting ahead of myself. First, the story.

Belli was born in Chicago in 1918, graduated from Lane Tech, and learned architecture by working for $5 a week in the office of Henry K.We are professional wholesale best Shun Stone Outdoor Paving Stone,large LED Dome / Reading Lampwholesale order. Holsman, where he also rubbed elbows with architects from Perkins & Will. He took classes at the Armour Institute (now IIT), and passed the certification exam without graduating. In 1945, just out of the army and attempting to establish his own practice, he got a break: a chance to do a project for the archdiocese, which wanted to convert an apartment building into a parish school. That didn't look like such a good idea to Belli, but he drew up a preliminary plan and, escorted by the parish priest, met with then archbishop and future cardinal Samuel Stritch in his office.

Belli, who'd learned how to pitch a project by watching Larry Perkins, recalled that he was doing all he could to sell it when things took an unexpected turn."Cardinal Stritch was a nice, easygoing individual. He ends up looking at me and he said, 'Edo, if you were sitting here and I was sitting where you're at, would you do what you're trying to convince me to do?" And I told him, 'No, it's like putting new shoes on a bum.' But I said, 'If somebody is going to do it, I'd like to do it.' So he said, 'That's what I wanted to hear.' And with that he dismisses us, and we go downstairs, and the priest [was so furious he] didn't even want me to take him home."

In the mid-1950s, handpicked by another loyal clientprinting magnate John Cuneo, who was funding the project for the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred HeartBelli got the assignment for the Frank Cuneo Hospital for Women & Children, on West Montrose. Working with a tiny, soggy lot on former water department property adjacent to Clarendon Park and the lakefront, he conjured up an innovative six-story, steel-frame, glass-and-concrete structure with circular surgery suites,Most modern headlight designs include Shun Stone Marble Slabs. a roofline that mimics an artist's palette, and majestic walls of mullioned windows that catch the sun, both east and west. And he dressed the whole thing up, inside and out, with crazy-quilt walls and accents of tiny, brightly colored Romany Spartan ceramic tiles. Photos of the surgical suites suggest that the effect must have been like operating in a jar of Jelly Bellies. The hospital opened in 1957.

Nearly two decades later Belli designed a very different companion structure for the site of the sisters' former convent, directly across the street from the hospital and connected to it by a sky bridge. A long-term care and rehabilitation center, it's a graceful, whimsical play on the brutalist turn contemporary architecture had by then taken, an assemblage of angled windows and surprising geometric shapes, including a circular "suspended" chapel and outcroppings of green-roof terrace that would be cutting-edge todayall in concrete with a textured skin of embedded marble chips.

The hospital complex closed in 1988 and became the Maryville Academy shelter for kids, but by 2009 the shelter had also closed and the sisters were looking to sell. In 2010, in the waning days of Helen Shiller's tenure as 46th Ward alderman, the Montrose/Clarendon TIF district was created specifically to encourage redevelopment of the Cuneo property. In 2011 a couple of heavy-handed, high-density plans were rejected by the community, now under the watch of Alderman James Cappelman. By early this year a group affiliated with JDL Development had a contract on the propertysubject to city approval of planning and zoning changes, destruction of the existing buildings, and $32 million in TIF funds. JDL plans to build what critics say is an equally problematic project: a $200 million, 800-unit luxury apartment and retail complex, designed by Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture, on the west-side property. (JDL president Jim Letchinger says negotiations with the city are continuing this week and that the TIF funding in question will be "substantially less than" $32 million.) The land where the east building stands would be donated to the Chicago Park District.
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