Photo:John Greenfield

By John Greenfield

7:58am After waking up at an ungodly hour, cycling to the CTA’s Fullerton stop, riding the Red Line south to 95th Street and pedaling a few more miles to the 103rd Street & Stony Island garage terminal, I board a shiny blue J14 Jeffery Jump express bus. As I load my cruiser onto the front bike rack, the driver calls out the open door, “Could you hurry up please? I gotta go.”

Launched on November 5, the Jump is a new service that’s the transit agency’s first venture into bus rapid transit (BRT), systems that create subway-like speeds for buses via car-free lanes and other timesavers. The Jump, funded with an $11 million Federal Transportation Administration grant, isn’t full-blown BRT. But it does include several pioneering features that will hopefully pave the way for bolder bus corridors downtown and on Ashland and Western avenues later this decade. I’m here to ride the entire sixteen-mile route from the Far South Side to the Loop, to see how these elements are working out. Read the rest of this entry »

Distance runners are a masochistic lot. Who in his or her right mind willfully rises at 5am on a Sunday morning in order to go out and run a baker’s dozen miles with a few thousand others? But even the most intrepid ultra-marathonner’s tolerance for pain has limits, and being greeted at such an early hour by a cheesy announcer cheerfully hyping the presence of the Blues Brothers at the starting line is very very close to any runner’s threshold.

Not surprisingly, this race, the inaugural 13.1 Chicago Marathon, is being produced by out-of-towners who’ve apparently yet to succumb to Jake and Elwood overexposure. The Chicago half-marathon universe is going through a big shakeup this year, with a doubling of the number of major races from two to four, signaled by the arrival of two national companies who make a  business out of producing long-distance races in various markets around the country. The Chicago Distance Classic, run each August, was sold and this year becomes the Rock ‘N’ Roll Chicago Half Marathon. And late last summer, the owners of the 13.1 series, Dallas-based US Road Sports and Entertainment Group, acquired the venerable Chicago Half Marathon just weeks before its running in September. Read the rest of this entry »

By Sean Redmond

Entering Wicker Park by the Blue Line, you emerge into the intersection of Damen, North and Milwaukee to a long-familiar sight. There’s the Double Door across the street, Flash Taco and, until just recently, the façade of Filter, Wicker Park’s former hipster coffeehouse extraordinaire. These staples, like many along these primary roadways, fade into the background with repeated visits; yes, you know you can find Reckless Records and American Apparel and the venues and art galleries in the surrounding area, but getting where you want to go requires little thought once you’re situated enough to put your eyes to the sidewalk and your feet into autopilot. But then one day, you get off the train and, surprise, the boarded-up shell of Filter is replaced with an expansive Bank of America, and your mind jolts back into motion. Suddenly, a wave of thoughts bursts forth: “Man, there are a lot of banks in the area,”or “Wicker Park really is getting commercialized,” or  “Maybe I need to start spending more time in Logan Square.”
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