… that it’s all over but the yard signs. Let’s hope candidates will have them removed promptly. If folks want to keep them as souvenirs, maybe they should be laminated and hung on inside walls.
… that next week is TV Tune-Out Week. What shall we do?
… that the City has approved the purchase of 378 trees for $80,390 from the Suburban Tree Consortium for planting in public areas this spring. Some of the planting (about 150 trees) will be outsourced to the
… that soon we’re going to be getting some really cool murals for some of our grungiest walls. Ava DiCapri, a student in Senior Studies at
… that the City will allow Comcast to keep its little fenced building at James Park for another three years. How many knew the building was there? How many knew what it was for? It’s called the Comcast Hubsite facility.
… that the City has come out with a list of the alleys to be paved this summer through the special assessment process (homeowners pay a part): north of Leonard, east of Asbury, west of Bryant; north of Madison Place, east of Pitner; north of Greenwood, east of Brown; north of Thayer, east of Marcy. Wonder how many of these will be “green” – that is, made of porous concrete and allowing for stormwater runoff.
… that the Police Department is going to get four new cars – three Ford Crown Victorias and one Ford Focus.
… that Café Luciano on
, which has apparently been closed for months, has allowed its liquor license to expire.
… that historian Janet Messenger has published a book called “The Streets of Evanston,” – endorsed by TG. This is a pretty cool book. Not only does it have the history of current Evanston streets, it has some stuff about former streets and what they’ve become, and pics of some really cool manhole (TG prefers “personhole”) covers. This is a book to make every Evanstonian streetwise. Now for sale at Perennials, 2022 Central St., the Main-Chicago Newsstand and the Evanston History Center, 225 Greenwood St.
From our readers:
TG: I noticed an anemometer spinning furiously atop one of the memorial columns at
this morning. Who owns it and where is the data stored? Thanks – Michael J. Molinaro,
From TG: The new anemometer was installed last year when the City had the fountains repaired. The information is used to regulate the flow of water in the fountains, to avoid spraying plumes of water on
patrons and passersby. The person at the City to talk to further is Facilities Manager David Cook.
TG: About those new wheeled recycling carts, I hear they are going to be blue. Why? Blue would certainly be an improvement over the ugly bright red crates our neighborhood has used for years. But why can’t these carts come in colors as unobtrusive as possible?
Residents have the carts near their house or garage and typically don’t want to call attention to them. And when we take a walk around town, we like to see the trees, the flowers, the squirrels and bunnies, the houses. We don’t want our eye drawn to the brightest thing around, the recycling can. With parkway pickups in different areas once a week, 25 percent
of the City is ugly four days a week. And,
let’s face it, lots of folks leave their cans out front all week.
So how about a campaign to mute these colors so the carts blend into the background? I want to recycle. I just don’t want my recycling cart to shout it out.
I understand the various cans have to be different colors so the workmen can differentiate one from the other. So if trash cans are black and yard recycling cans are green, how about brown or grey for the recycling carts? – Janet Messenger
From TG: TG sees that you copied Streets & San superintendent Suzette Eggleston on your letter and Ms. Eggleston copied TG (more or less) on her reply, reprinted below. However, TG would like to expand on one point you made: There should be a fine, something like $25/day, for garbage, yard waste or recycling carts left in front after the day of pickup.
TG: Collection in the parkway occurs only when alley access is not available or difficult to access. This represents less than 10% of the City’s residential collection responsibilities. The City chose blue as the color for recycling carts for two reasons: (1) The color blue is closely associated with recycling, and (2) the color blue provides a distinction between the City’s garbage carts (charcoal) and yard waste carts (green) thereby increasing the likelihood that residents will dispose of items in the proper containers. Overflowing garbage containers on less than three percent parkways four days of week are much more of an eyesore than the blue recycling cart. We are hoping to eliminate garbage overflow throughout the City by providing more recycling capacity and education.
By the way, the color brown was not feasible, as it is the color of our neighbors’ garbage carts in
– Suzette Eggleston
Superintendent of Streets & Sanitation
From TG: So it looks like we have to color-code our waste.
… that everyone should do something green this month: Walk to work or to the library, use more tap water and less bottled water, change some incandescent bulbs to CFLs or clean up the trash on your street or block. All this ugly, ugly trash in gutters and around fences really needs to go. TG has suggested before that trash found belonging to any fast-food chain within a 200-yeard radius of that chain should be simply returned to the place of origin.