All's Wells That Ends Wells
I went to this corner hoping the arrangement of street signs would allow something they didn't, but here's the picture anyway.
There was recently a small-scale hullabaloo in Chicago over the name of Balbo Street, a minor street two blocks south and several blocks east of where I took this picture. Balbo is short, connecting one side of Grant Park with the other and then going no place else. It was named in honor of Italo Balbo, a leader of the paramilitary wing of Italy's National Fascist Party leading up to World War II who went on to command Mussolini's air force. Last year, some batch of alderman tripped over a history book and decided we needed to rename the street, and there was a lot of talk about replacing Balbo's name with that of Ida B. Wells, a Chicago-based African-American jounalist and educator of the early 20th century. This got Ida B. Wells fans excited, because she was probably a better person to name things after than a fascist.
But then there was a backlash, because despite King Richard I's attempt to use the construction of a college campus to erase Chicago's Italian neighborhood in the 1960s, there are still a lot of Italians in Chicago, and they still like having streets named after Italians, even if the particular Italian in question was a horribly racist fascist. The Italians threw a fit, and the city council decided not to rename Balbo. But they'd already gotten the African-American community all excited about Ida B. Wells. So, in their infinite wisdom, the city council decided instead to rename the street running right to left in this picture. This is the former Congress Parkway, a remnant of a street that once ran all the way across town but now runs from the south side of the Loop to the start of the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290), immediately to my left. This is now Ida B. Wells Drive.
Which, you know, is just fine, because Ida B. Wells is a worthy person to honor with a street, except for what happens at this intersection. The one-way street coming straight at me from the north in this picture is named for a U.S. Army captain who died in 1812 at the Battle of Fort Dearborn. That captain's name was William Wells. So now, I'm standing at the corner of Wells and Wells, and that's a lot of Wells. Balbo doesn't intersect Wells, so you wouldn't have had that problem if you'd just renamed Balbo. But now all the GPS systems are going to get confused, and you're going to wind up with a bunch of lost tourists.
All's Wells That Ends Wells
I went to this corner hoping the arrangement of street signs would allow something they didn't, but here's the picture anyway.
There was recently a small-scale hullabaloo in Chicago over the name of Balbo Street, a minor street two blocks south and several blocks east of where I took this picture. Balbo is short, connecting one side of Grant Park with the other and then going no place else. It was named in honor of Italo Balbo, a leader of the paramilitary wing of Italy's National Fascist Party leading up to World War II who went on to command Mussolini's air force. Last year, some batch of alderman tripped over a history book and decided we needed to rename the street, and there was a lot of talk about replacing Balbo's name with that of Ida B. Wells, a Chicago-based African-American jounalist and educator of the early 20th century. This got Ida B. Wells fans excited, because she was probably a better person to name things after than a fascist.
But then there was a backlash, because despite King Richard I's attempt to use the construction of a college campus to erase Chicago's Italian neighborhood in the 1960s, there are still a lot of Italians in Chicago, and they still like having streets named after Italians, even if the particular Italian in question was a horribly racist fascist. The Italians threw a fit, and the city council decided not to rename Balbo. But they'd already gotten the African-American community all excited about Ida B. Wells. So, in their infinite wisdom, the city council decided instead to rename the street running right to left in this picture. This is the former Congress Parkway, a remnant of a street that once ran all the way across town but now runs from the south side of the Loop to the start of the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290), immediately to my left. This is now Ida B. Wells Drive.
Which, you know, is just fine, because Ida B. Wells is a worthy person to honor with a street, except for what happens at this intersection. The one-way street coming straight at me from the north in this picture is named for a U.S. Army captain who died in 1812 at the Battle of Fort Dearborn. That captain's name was William Wells. So now, I'm standing at the corner of Wells and Wells, and that's a lot of Wells. Balbo doesn't intersect Wells, so you wouldn't have had that problem if you'd just renamed Balbo. But now all the GPS systems are going to get confused, and you're going to wind up with a bunch of lost tourists.