28-Jun-09 – The victim is recovering, but the suspect in the May 16 shooting near Marina City is still at large. According to Chicago Police spokesperson Michael Fitspatrick, “The victim could not give a good description of the offender and no one has been charged.”
It happened at about 3:50 a.m. following a late night concert at House of Blues Chicago early on a Saturday morning. Police spokesperson JoAnn Taylor says the 21-year-old man, whose name was not released, got in a fight and was shot in the buttocks with a handgun. He was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital where he was last reported in stable condition.
(Above) Frame from video captured May 16 by NBC Chicago.
Witnesses say multiple fights broke out at House of Blues about 45 minutes into a concert by the Canadian rapper Drake. According to Allhiphop.com, Drake took the stage at around 3 a.m.
Patrons were then asked to leave. A subsequent altercation outside the club led to the shooting on North State Street next to Marina City.
Drake cancelled an appearance that was to have followed the concert.
Amateur video from inside the club shows the concert stopping due to a disturbance in the crowd. At one point, one of the performers says, “Everybody clear the stage.” He then urges the audience to tell the people causing the disturbance to “get the hell out.”
“You got to understand,” he says. “This is a Drake show. It’s all about love. Chi-town, you know we love you, right?”
18-Jun-09 – It came down to two chefs, but Graham Elliot Bowles did not win Wednesday’s challenge on Top Chef Masters. The Marina City resident was on the first two shows of the first season of the new series, a spin-off of Bravo television network’s Top Chef in which world-renowned chefs compete in culinary challenges.
Top chefs competing Wednesday on Bravo TV’s Top Chef Masters were, left to right, Wylie Dufresne, Elizabeth Falkner, Graham Elliot Bowles, and Suzanne Tracht.
Graham scored 20.5 stars, beating Wylie Dufresne of New York and Elizabeth Falkner of San Francisco but not Suzanne Tracht of Los Angeles, who scored 22.5 stars.
But he called it a fun experience. “I was very honored just to simply be part of this and be cooking along side some really great culinary luminaries,” he said in his “exit interview” on the show. He’s now looking forward to returning to Chicago to “be able to do some great food at my restaurant.”
Bowles moved into the west tower at Marina City last year. He is the chef and owner of Graham Elliot, what he calls a “bistronomic” restaurant combining four-star cuisine with humor and accessibility. It is located at 217 West Huron Street in Chicago’s River North neighborhood.
Bowles is the youngest four-star chef in the nation. After moving to Chicago from Dallas, he worked at Charlie Trotters for three years, followed by Tru and then Avenues at The Peninsula Hotel. He has been given perfect reviews by Chicago Magazine, Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Tribune.
According to Bravo, the winners of the first six episodes will eventually compete against each other. The winner at the end of the season will be crowned Top Chef Master and $100,000 will be donated to the charity of their choice. Bowles was competing for American Heart Association.
Graham’s exit interview:
21-Jun-09 – All of the reviews needed to obtain a building permit for planned alterations to the laundry rooms on the 20th floors of each tower have been approved. The City of Chicago Department of Buildings approved the last one, a refrigeration review, on June 16. According to the department’s web site, a building permit was issued that same day.
Unit owners who attended the June 18 meeting of the Marina Towers Condominium Association board of directors say they were told the fitness room will be located in the west residential tower. It was not made public until last week which tower would get the fitness room.
According to residential property manager David Gantt, the west tower was chosen for the fitness room because there was was more support for it from west tower residents. He also noted at the June 18 meeting that the property management office is closer to the east tower, where the MTCA meeting room will be constructed.
On January 15, MTCA unanimously approved a controversial $435,000 plan to build a fitness room on the 20th floor of one residential tower and a new MTCA meeting room in the other tower.
Residents of the west tower at Marina City have been notified that their laundry room will close on June 22 for “a month or so.” According to a June 5 memo from property manager Gantt, west tower residents will also not be allowed access to the storage room between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.
2-Jul-09 – The 20 most common words used on Marina City Online, according to Google...
1. marina
2. chicago
3. mtca
4. says
5. condominium
6. building
7. condo
8. attorney
9. tower
10. property
11. unit
12. levin
13. owners
14. towers
15. illinois
16. kimmel
17. according
18. north
19. state
20. dick’s
MCO, meanwhile, has analyzed all of the comments in April, May, and June on the Marina City resident blog, Marina Watch Dog Sound Off. These are the 20 most popular nouns...
1. people
2. blog
3. marina
4. city
5. board
6. post, posts
7. time
8. kcg
9. fox
10. day
11. phl
12. tower
13. news
14. things
15. fire
16. bloggers
17. resident, residents
18. chicago
19. person
20. blogmeister
“kcg” and “phl” are initials used by two popular bloggers, “fox” refers to Fox News, and “blogmeister” is the nickname of the blog’s editor, Mark Ulaszek.
Honorable mentions from the next 12 words include “west” (appearing more often than “east”), “owners,” “renters,” and “donna.”
How this was done: Comments from the blog were copied and pasted into a text file. A Perl script was developed to open the file, isolate each word, create a list of unique words, and then count the number of times each word appears in the text. From the most popular words, nouns were then picked out manually.
(Above) Looking west down Chicago River toward Marina City. Click on image to view larger version.
13-Jun-09 – Marina City and 999 other downtown buildings are represented in a detailed scale model of Chicago on display at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.
Chicago Model City is part of the centennial celebration of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago that was an important influence on how the city developed.
The 25 x 35-foot exhibition fills the atrium of the Sante Fe Building, Burnham’s former headquarters, located at 224 South Michigan. The scale of the models is one inch for every 50 feet, making Sears Tower nearly three feet tall.
The four square miles represented by the model cover 400 city blocks, from Lake Michigan west to Halsted Street, Oak Street south to 16th Street. Every building is depicted. Lighting simulates a 24-hour day, going from morning to night every 15 minutes.
Architects, model makers, and industrial designers worked together to create the exhibit. Columbian Model & Exhibit Works, Ltd., a Chicago company featured in Marina City Online in April, created the models using specialized software and a three-dimensional printer.
The exhibit is “designed to get people thinking about how cities develop,” according to a news release. “The exhibition shows how Chicago is a model for understanding all cities.”
The exhibition is free and open daily through November 20, 2009.
15-Jun-09 – The self-described personal memoirs blog of a Marina City resident has been ranked in the Top 20 of a list of local online news publications.
Mike Doyle’s Chicago Carless blog was ranked 18th in a report by Community Media Workshop. The report was commissioned by the Knight Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to promoting journalism, and The Chicago Community Trust, which according to its web site awarded $115 million in 2007 to not-for-profit organizations.
“The NEW news: Journalism We Want And Need” is an effort to explore innovations in how information, especially at the local level, is collected and disseminated. It was authored by Gordon Mayer and Community Media Workshop president Thom Clark, who observe that, “overall, local news coverage has been declining for some time and online local news publications, albeit in their nascent stages, have not yet filled the gap.”
Calling the Internet “arguably the cheapest, most democratic publishing medium in history,” the report says “its freedom of expression also means that diverse voices will express themselves in ways that might draw scorn from professional journalists.”
“The space available to produce local news at our traditional print and broadcast news outlets is shrinking. That shrinkage is producing exciting opportunities for the growth of local online news. The good news is, everyone from experts to everyday people identify local news as a crucial need of democracy.”
Describing his blog as “the life and times of a former New Yorker living in downtown Chicago,” Doyle (left, represented in an illustration from his blog) started Chicago Carless in June 2005. He says he “scribes about his Chicago life with brutal honesty.”
“I’ll stick with the approach that works,” says Doyle, a public relations consultant, “writing from the heart about the local issues I care about and reaching out to my community of readers in a spirit of transparent debate. That, and never thinking I have an exclusive license on the truth or other shape-shifting forms of alleged objectivity.”
Steven Dahlman, editor of Marina City Online, is a writer and photographer who lives at Marina City. He has 30 years of experience as a professional journalist, writing for radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and web sites. He was a radio news director, reporter, and anchor for more than a dozen stations and networks.
From 1984 to 1990, he was a regular contributor to ABC Radio Networks. Dahlman has written extensively about Marina City since 2005 and is currently working on a book about its history.
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