Never be surprised again. The latest “smart” Panasonic stereo receiver knows the frequency, location, and format of 9,400 radio stations across the U.S. It can be programmed so that “new stations–with the same format–are chosen automatically as you drive from one city to the next.” Yeah, but can it find a WXRT format in Sioux City?
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“In a number of ways the stretch of Kennedy Expressway visible from the East River Road bridge can be seen as a quite literal re-creation of a traditional downtown,” writes Robert Bruegmann in Inland Architect (November/December 1990). “O’Hare/Rosemont and other outlying business centers give us the extraordinary opportunity to observe with our own eyes the creation of a landscape which is as much a response to market forces and design beliefs in our times as the Loop in the late-19th century was to its….Silvery metal towers line up beside the highway, channeling the view toward the Loop…. the roadway fans out into a maze of ramps, toll booths, and Chicago Transit Authority facilities. The bridge shudders from the combined roar of traffic on the expressway, the CTA train approaching from the Loop, and planes homing in on O’Hare. Though few observers would consider this landscape sublime, it does have elements of an awesome beauty. It is also a quintessentially late-20th-century landscape. As recently as the 1950s there was no bridge, no expressway, no airport; only a country road running peacefully between the forest preserve and fields, a few houses, and a horse farm.”
“Butts and booze” billboards are not concentrated in poor minority neighborhoods, yet these neighborhoods are overrun with billboards of all kinds, most of them illegal. This according to a Chicago Reporter survey (November 1990). “The percentage of billboards pushing cigarettes and liquor was roughly the same among the neighborhoods surveyed–from 40 to 55 percent. The difference is that while billboards dot middle-income, white areas, they choke low-income, minority areas,” writes Laurie Abraham. “In the predominantly white areas, which had an average poverty rate of 11 percent, the number of signs ranged from 19 in Norwood/Edison Park to 57 in Brighton Park. But black neighborhoods with poverty rates higher than 40 percent averaged 207 billboards; the high was Englewood’s 271, the low Roseland’s 142. The two poorest Hispanic areas also each had more than 200 signs.”
