Medill Magazine Writing - Submitted: March 12, 2002

1930 Ridge

By Patrick Cooper
Medill News Service

Just outside the Loop, the locomotive eases from under the cover of the Ogilvie Transportation Center, 135 tons of steel and iron grinding. The Metra logo gleams dimly on the engine's sides and disappears into the darkness of the rail yard. Behind are the double-decker cars, bleary-eyed passengers sparse in the rows of seats. As the train begins its northerly course, commuters stare east through the windows to the all-night lights of Chicago.

The engine picking up speed, the city center fades away. While great Golden buildings continue on the distant lakefront, the structures along the tracks get shorter. Rising from Michigan, the winter sun kicks off rooftops.

Clybourn; Ravenswood. At each stop squinting conductors hustle to punch tickets. Neighborhoods pass around and below. The train is a flying roar in the morning rush. Rogers Park; Main Street; Davis Street - downtown Evanston. The sun is high enough for the foremen nearby. They walk their construction sites to get a grasp of the day's work.

Pulling out of Davis Street, the train begins an express run to Winnetka, the next suburb. But a minute out of the Davis stop, it crosses a long bridge over the intersection of Emerson Street, Ridge Avenue and Green Bay Road. Just past the bridge, to the east, is an abandoned parking lot that will lie empty all day, as 31 more trains run north and another 31 run south.

Soon, foremen will be walking this lot at 1930 Ridge Ave., planning how they will dig down and then build up. Developers pushed for a full year to get that privilege, debating and compromising with city government, neighbors and the anxious soul of a growing suburb. A four-building luxury apartment complex, "The Reserve at Evanston," will rise here above the rails, and for a brief moment in the early dawn, the cars of the passing train will darken, the sunlight blocked from its windows.

Below, on the streets of Evanston, people will hear the train thunder by. When they look up, some of these people will notice the new Reserve complex too. Others will notice its shadow.

The development has stirred contentious community discussion from the beginning. The Reserve's building, now months behind schedule and still not begun, has pitted developers versus city officials, developers versus neighbors, residents versus businesses and aldermen versus aldermen. The city council approved the plan on Jan. 28 in a 6-3 vote, but only after a year of social examination. The question of "Does this building fit here?" could only be answered with "What does 'here' mean?"

The land

As the first suburb north of Chicago, Evanston grapples with more "big-city" problems than most of the North Shore townships. Crime is higher, especially toward the Chicago line, and a larger amount of poorer residents place a greater demand on city services. To fight an ongoing deficit, the city encourages development, especially in its downtown area.

At the helm of the 1930 Ridge project is Richard Aaronson, president of Atlantic Realty Partners in Atlanta. Although he lives in Coca-Cola country, Aaronson was raised alongside the hops of Milwaukee. His accent now is a mix: a hint of a twang to some words and some Midwestern roundness to others. After emerging as a leader in the Atlanta apartment industry, he started Atlantic Realty in 1995.

A few years later, back in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Atlantic undertook "The Reserve at Wauwatosa Village," a 231-unit luxury apartment complex. The company also began looking for a spot to build on Chicago's North Shore. After about two years of hunting, they found their "Christmas stocking" on Ridge Avenue.

The piece of land is wide at the top, holding a parking garage and a cavernous concrete building that runs nearly the full depth of the property. The bottom two-thirds of the land are a parking lot that slopes downward toward the east-west path of Emerson Street. The lot curves to fit snugly against the low hill of the Metra tracks, and it narrows, an Atlantic Realty representative told a city meeting, "as if it's a stocking hanging from a mantle piece."

Once used by car dealerships and then by Whole Foods supermarket, 1930 Ridge is nearly vacant and has been since 1997. Bumpers for grocery carts remain by the building's boarded-up entrance, and inside an auto dealership stores extra cars.

With the Ridge Avenue and the Metra tracks on the other, the lot is a place to be passed by. Many Evanston officials feel the same way about Evanston. The city council has been more reluctant to approve new housing developments than retail centers. Century Theaters, the recently built 18-screen movie theater in Evanston, draws a mention at nearly every council meeting. The aldermen remark happily on how many people have been "visiting" Evanston and enjoying "what we have to offer."

With the 1930 Ridge development, the point was hit home during a June meeting of the Evanston Plan Commission. Aaronson was talking about community concerns when he said: "I think it's just a question of the urban nature of the site versus nonurban and it's-"

A commission member interrupted him. "This is the suburbs, not the city," she said.

The plan

"We anticipated it would take a while, but it took a bit longer than anticipated," Richard Aaronson says slowly, chuckling a little as he finishes the sentence. The project took more than a year to get zoning approval. Now, with more permits still left to obtain, the Reserve at Evanston sits half a year behind schedule. Groundbreaking, which would have happened in November, is now planned for late June or early July.

The blueprints themselves have changed drastically, the result of the city forcing Atlantic back to the drawing board, time and time again. An eight-story building in December 2000 became an 11-story building three months later, but reverted to eight stories by June 2001. The ultimate design would not come until October 2001: a series of four-story buildings, four in all, with parking in an underground garage.

When Aaronson talks about the changes, he talks about the "frustration" and "tenacity" of his company. "We were motivated to try and find a solution," he says. For any major change in Evanston, developers have to push hard because there is always somebody willing to push back.

Ask neighbor Daniel Garrison, one of the leaders in fighting 1930 Ridge. Sitting in his basement office at Northwestern's Kresge Hall, Garrison, a professor, swivels in his chair, pulling himself to his computer desk. He hunts and pecks at the keyboard, but quickly brings up the City of Evanston Web site and jumps to the page of committees. "Look at that list," he says, pointing.

The list is two columns wide. Thirty-two boards, commissions and committees, all staffed with volunteers from Evanston's communities, with some people bringing professional experience. These officials often bring up neighborhood qualms even before the neighbors do. Between the volunteer and elected boards and the residents who lobby them, the city is never at a loss for words.

To Aaronson's credit, various city boards and councils eventually came around on the project. The neighbors aren't completely convinced, but, as Garrison says, "it's not as bad it as it started." The final design, brick buildings separated by courtyards, mimics the apartments up the hill. The height of the buildings, finally down to four stories, won't "block out the sky" as many neighbors initially worried.

Density remains the neighbors' biggest problem with the site. When 200 units worth of people arrive in the neighborhood, the balance of the area will tilt further away from homes, the neighbors say. Although many loved having the old Whole Foods grocery store nearby, they remember the traffic backing up along Ridge Avenue. But, besides the cars, there are the people. These new people will have no history in the area, and, the neighbors fear, no sense of stake.

Garrison's eyes twinkle at the complexity of the situation. "The developer," he says, "has become the devil we know."

The shift

The devil they don't know is the neighbors they don't know. This devil is the devil the neighbors didn't realize even existed until this year. When the plans for 1930 Ridge became public last spring, the neighbors, led by Garrison, began to organize. They got out to city meetings. They distributed fliers. They went door to door with a petition against the project. Along the way, as they visited block after block, climbing too many steps to too many front doors, they began to notice the mailboxes.

From the street, the houses looked like houses - one entrance, a car or two in the driveway. But upon closer examination, getting right up to the front door, there was more than one name by the mailbox. The neighbors were startled. "Right away we knew we were in trouble," Garrison says. Quasi-apartments equaled renters. Renters equaled a lot fewer people than expected who had a stake in the community.

On the 1930 Ridge project, the people at Atlantic Realty found out just how active the city was. The developers likely got an extra dose of it. At the same time, residents were discovering just how active they needed to be.

"Here," to many of the people living nearby, means a traditional, active Evanston neighborhood. As they tell it, they look around and take comfort in what they see: middle-class, single-family homes with kids and dogs and a tree covering that helped shade their small yards. Yes, there are some apartment buildings in the neighborhood, up the hill toward the Evanston Civic Center, but the brick structures have been there as long as anything else. They fit.

The businesses in the neighborhood fit too. Scattered but at least nearby, many of the businesses are self-run. There is a small strip mall to the east, on Emerson Street, a long facing rows of stores and restaurants to the North, on Noyes Street, and a few places surviving (and thriving) to the west on Green Bay Road.

Running side by side with the Metra tracks, the north-south artery of Green Bay is a racial dividing line of sorts in Evanston. Just to the east, closer to Northwestern University and Lake Michigan, the blocks are mostly white. About 70 percent so, according to the 2000 census. To the west, on the way to Skokie and the western suburbs of Chicago, is nearly 80 percent black.

But white or black, the residents of the area know how to organize. When they get behind something - or get against something - they will be heard. It's the Evanston way. With this going for them, Garrison thinks his small movement got as far as it could. But he and his neighbors worry about the issue of stake. He comes back to it repeatedly as he talks about the project.

Students from Northwestern live in many of these houses, converted by absentee landlords to apartment use. Many of their neighbors stand up at public meetings to complain about students passing through their blocks and creating public nuisances with parties and trash. Now these students live on those blocks too, without the supervision they often receive in the area apartment buildings. Garrison calls it "the student ghetto."

Atlantic Realty has studied the issue and expects the Reserve at Evanston to be about 30 percent students, a number similar to the other luxury apartment complexes in Evanston. Despite this assurance, Garrison says he found little comfort. Stake is stake, and he says the "student ghetto" is the results of what happens when there isn't stake among a dense population. "You sort of expect to know the people in your neighborhood," he says. "We're in this glut of density issues in which the neighborhoods always lose."

"I think we feel like we lost, yeah," Garrison says, folding his hands behind his head. "But we also feel like it's not the biggest calamity." The neighbors' time was well spent and won important concessions from the developers, he continues. "It would have been a win if they had brought the density down."

The Shack

Across the street from the big empty lot, the Chicken Shack Restaurant at 1925 Ridge Ave. has nothing and everything to do with the incoming project. The Chicken Shack would probably be known as a greasy spoon joint if it actually had silverware, but it doesn't. Instead it's just known for good and greasy chicken and fish. If you want a drink with that meal, pop some quarters in the vending machine.

Inside the place is kept clean - even the teenagers throw away their trash. Hanging by the register are two signs, one for an African Liberation Day celebration and the other for a rally to support slavery reparations. Rick the owner stands behind the red countertop. He doesn't have much to say to a reporter, not even his last name, but he jokes how the old Whole Foods store brought a different kind of customer to his place.

"They used to sell tomatoes over there. $4 a pound!" he laughs. "The people, they used to go shopping over there, and then come over here with their shopping bags and get something to eat." He chuckles some more, a bit of an incredulous grin on his face.

It takes all kinds at the Chicken Shack. Rick is white; the staff is white, black and Hispanic, and the customers are diverse too. They drive and walk in from everywhere. Evanston and NU employees walk down from nearby offices everyday on lunch breaks, but the neighbors, coming from all sides, keep the place in business. One morning, just before opening, a boy runs up the street and peers in the glass of the front door; the first shift unlocks the door five minutes early for him.

If you sit at one of the few tables, you can eat your chicken or shrimp in peace and, for a few months longer, watch the Metra trains pass. When building begins, there will be plenty of construction workers on the other side of Ridge Avenue who want a hearty, working man's lunch. After that, there will be plenty of apartment dwellers who will stop in the Chicken Shack too, adding to the mix.

Rick is all for the increase in business. But who he is he to say anything, he jokes. "You might want to talk to the neighbors," he says seriously, as he turns to head back to the kitchen. "I bet they have something to say."