* Milwaukee-Damen-North hangouts Filter and Swank Frank are getting the boot for another Bank of America branch. One Chicagoist commenter suggests that “under the area’s Pedestrian Street zoning, new banks within a block of an existing bank have to apply for special use permits.” A lot of argument centers around the convincing idea that banks snuff street traffic, but then again Broadway and Clark in Lakeview are lousy with them.
* A browse through the comments at Yelp leads me to believe Filter is one of Chicago’s more polarizing joints. My favorite comment: “Come for the coffee, stay for the Stevie. Leave because of the music.” Having been a barista with alienating taste in music, I sympathize with both parties.
* Northwestern’s Methods Reporter notes that the generation of young professionals who transformed Bucktown are having trouble finding schools now that they’re having kids.
* Detroit/Chicago producer and DJ Jeff Mills is opening a new Euro clothing boutique in Wicker Park that sets a new standard for terrible boutique names: Gamma Player Shop. You can hear a couple of Mills’s Detroit house mixes at deephousepage.com (search for “Jeff Mills”).
* A tenth anniversary rerelease of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville promises “a new Brad Wood mix, demos from Phair’s still-unreleased ‘girlysound’ tapes, pictures, and extensive interviews covering ‘the whole Wicker Park story… Urge [Overkill], Hendy, Material Issue, Casey [Rice], Idful, The Rainbow, Johnny Machine, Nasty Steve Albini, etc.'” Never mind. I guess that never saw the light of day.
* Chicago Journal has audio of the recent aldermanic debate between incumbent Ted Matlak and runoff challenger Scott Waguespack; it gets aheated, unsurprisingly, over zoning and development. The Journal also reported a couple weeks ago that Bucktown’s Northwest Tower is at risk.
* Berny Stone’s son, Jay, who’s shown a knack for picking aldermanic races, thinks Waguespack can unseat Matlak. The Methods Reporter ran a profile of Waguespack (who served as an adviser to the interim president of Kosovo and worked on Carol Moseley Braun’s presidential campaign) in November.
* One of Clout City’s more compelling comments-section throwdowns came about over the Matlak-Waguespack race. The runoff election is scheduled for April 17.
**I forget, sometimes, not to be too dry on the Web. What do you call that stage of development where a neighborhood goes from sans-Busy Bee Wicker Park to chain banks and generic condos on all the side streets? It’s clearly a significant step more gentrified. I’m going to go with post-gentrification.