By Katie Buitrago
The Tribune has introduced its new beta platform for local blogs. Here at the Beachwood’s Chicago Blog Review Desk, we’ll be taking a look at some of the new – and familiar – faces you can find there.
–
Blog: Parking Ticket Geek
Description: Information, advice, and fury over matters driving-related.
Substance: You may know the Parking Ticket Geek from his other home at The Expired Meter. Unlike CTA Tattler, which made the switch completely to ChicagoNow, The Expired Meter is still being updated with the same content as the new blog, for some reason. The Parking Ticket Geek follows parking-related news with incisive analysis, gives a weekly advice column on how to beat bogus parking tickets, and advises drivers on parts of town to avoid when big events are going on. It’s a great mix of public service announcement and scathing attacks on Chicago’s parking policies. The Geek points out hypocrisy and even does original reporting to dig up fascinating info that mainstream reporters are missing. The downfall of many a blog is that they’re just another aggregator, but the Parking Ticket Geek actually brings new content to the table. *golf clap*

Read More

Posted on June 5, 2009

By Katie Buitrago
The Tribune introduced its new beta platform for local blogs this week. Here at the Beachwood’s Chicago Blog Review desk, we’ll be taking a look at some of the new – and familiar – faces you can find there.
*
Blog: CTA Tattler
Description: “Seen and Heard on the Chicago Transit Authority”
Substance: Kevin O’Neil has been chronicling stuff about the CTA for five years and, as of Tuesday, is now part of the Tribune’s stable of local blogs at Chicago Now (stay away from the Trib, man! It’s a sinking goddamned ship! The desk chairs, they are being rearranged!). The use of “chronicle” to describe his work is O’Neil’s own designation, and it is entirely, though not quite positively, apt. A handy search of Merriam-Webster defines “chronicle” as “an historical account of events arranged in order of time usually without analysis or interpretation.” O’Neil gathers CTA-related news and collects stories about wild and wacky sightings on our trains and buses, as well as posts service advisories and news updates from the CTA itself. It’s fun for its entertainment value, but usually I’ve already read all the news he references by the time he gets to it – sometimes days before. If you’re not a news junkie like me, it’s a useful place to read up on transportation news. But I’m disappointed that he linked to a CBS2 investigation of the CTA failing to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act that was published a full week after a ChicagoTalks investigation (posted partially on The Beachwood Reporter) of the exact same thing that, for some reason, didn’t merit a mention at all.

Read More

Posted on May 29, 2009

By Katie Buitrago
Blog: The Urbanophile
Description: “Urban Affairs and the Future of the Midwest City.”
Substance: The Urbanophile is both the moniker of and web home of the expansive mind of Aaron M. Renn. He’s a self-described “independent urban affairs thinker, strategist, and writer” who pumps the blog full of original analyses of urban issues, ranging from transportation to development to architecture and more. Sometimes he takes on recent developments in urban planning, and at other times produces his own theories of ways to improve the Midwestern city. He has one leg in Chicago and one in Indianapolis and often uses the cities as the jumping-off points for his essays. Renn clearly has a wealth for his topics and references a broad range of sources from his comprehensive blogroll and – gasp – books. You may remember him for his suburb-infuriating winning entry in the Chicago Community Trust’s competition of ideas to raise CTA ridership to 1 billion a year.

Read More

Posted on May 22, 2009

By Katie Buitrago
Blog: The Chicago Blog
Description: “Publicity news from the University of Chicago Press including news tips, press releases, reviews, and intelligent commentary.”
Substance: When the first two words I see on a blog are “publicity news,” my first inclination is to Abort Mission Internet faster than you can say Missed Connection. Very little could be as boring as people trying to sell you stuff and disguising it as content: it’s not an ad, it’s a blog! Trust! There are comments! And links! And an About page where you can find how to spend all of your discretionary income on my product learn more about me!
But the University of Chicago Press has the good fortune of trying to sell you stuff that’s pretty damn good. The largest scholarly press in America gets to pick from the cream of the crop, both books- and staff-wise, and the result is that their blog is both smartly written and based on interesting books. Bloggers SXH and TXM (surprisingly not designer drugs) reach into the vaults of the Press several times a day and pull out books relevant to major news and trends. Occasionally, Press authors will weigh in on current affairs. Some posts are simply squees about awards and readings.
Ultimately, the Chicago Blog is what it says it is: a publicity blog. But self-promotion isn’t such a bad thing – and is even useful – when their products are interesting, relevant, and smart.

Read More

Posted on May 13, 2009

By The Beachwood Book Club Bureau
Wanna know what we’re reading? Wanna help grow this page?
You can do both by joining our new Beachwood Book Club on Goodreads.
Description: For readers of The Beachwood Reporter to share reviews, events, and discussion. Members agree to allow the Beachwood to post any material here to the website. Emphasis on non-fiction books and Chicago authors and topics, though not restricted to such.

Read More

Posted on May 12, 2009

By Katie Buitrago
Editor’s Note: This is the first in our long-awaited Chicago Blog Review series.
Blog: Chicagoland
Description: The Chicago Reader’s home for a lil’ bit of everything.
Style: The tagline is “A Reader staff blog,” but Chicagoland is dominated, happily, by web producer Whet Moser. Moser, a graduate of Deep Springs and the U of C, is whip-smart without suffering from pedantry. He’s relevant and funny with a sharp Internet-ready humor that, I suspect, comes from many hours spent online in the early days of IRC and message boards (correct me if I’m wrong, but I know my people). Media outlets’ blogs often feel like columns wrested from the pages of their print edition and dropped on the Internet with little modification. Not so here – he fits the news to the medium masterfully.

Read More

Posted on May 6, 2009

By The Beachwood Society of Midland Authors Affairs Desk
The Society of Midland Authors has announced the winners of its annual awards for books by Midwest authors published in 2008. We’ve got ’em here, plus a critic’s award goes to a Beachwood favorite.
*
Category: Adult Fiction
Winner: Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project
Publisher: Riverhead
Author Lives In: Chicago
Finalists: Tony Romano, If You Eat, You Never Die; Jeffery Renard Allen, Holding Pattern.

Read More

Posted on May 5, 2009

The second of a two-part authorized excerpt from Tribune reporter Jeff Coen’s Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob. (Part one.)
*
By Jeff Coen
In Oak Park, Michael Spilotro had been getting ready for what supposedly was his making day, but there were signs that the brothers weren’t simply blindly heading for their doom. With the recent troubles they were certainly suspicious, but not answering such a request for their appearances was not an option. Michael was worried enough to give his daughter his jewelry in a plastic sandwich bad and ask for her to bring it to a graduation party they were to attend that night. He told his wife he would meet her after his business was finished, but if he wasn’t there by 9:00, she should assume that something was very wrong.

Read More

Posted on April 30, 2009

The first of a two-part authorized excerpt from Tribune reporter Jeff Coen’s Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob.
*
By Jeff Coen
The story of Anthony “the Ant” Spilotro is hardly unknown. Like Joey Lombardo, Spilotro rose to become a crime boss from humble beginnings in the old West Side neighborhood, one of six children born to his immigrant parents. He dropped out of Chicago’s Steinmetz High School and turned to crime early on, taking up with local theft rings and getting noticed by the neighborhood’s Outfit leaders. He would be placed in charge of a significant bookmaking operation and work in Irwin Weiner’s bail bonding business. His reputation for brutality dated to the early 1960s, when he would be connected to what became known as the “M&M murders,” so named for victims Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Miraglia, two members of a burglary crew believed to have taken part in an unauthorized murder. When McCarthy was too slow in providing information about the killing and who was involved, Spilotro resorted to putting his head in a vise until one of his eyes popped out.
Spilotro would go on to become a trusted associate of Joey Aiuppa and Lombardo, sent to Las Vegas in the early 1970s to be the guy on the ground who ensured that the Chicago mob’s will was done there. Once he was installed, local authorities famoulsy noticed a spike in gangland killings, and Spilotro started his own burglary ring, know as the “Hole in the Wall Gang” for its favorite tactic to avoid alarm systems while stealing jewelry. He was accused but never convicted of employing a team of thieves that included the likes of Sal Romano, Frank Cullotta, and feared hit man “Crazy Larry” Neumann.
Some members of Spilotro’s family still say that his reputation is overblown and that he wasn’t the criminal he has been made out to be, but his Las Vegas exploits were immortalized in the 1995 film Casino, where Joe Pesci played a character named Nicky Santoro, who was based on Spilotro.

Read More

Posted on April 29, 2009

By Beachwood Books
In advance of a two-part authorized excerpt – starting Wednesday – about the mob murders of fellow Outfit men Tony and Michael Spilotro from Tribune reporter Jeff Coen’s Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled The Chicago Mob, we’ve taken a look through a host of other books in the mob pantheon to see what others had to say about how the Spilotros got to where they did – before they got to be too much for Outfit elders to take.
–
Casino/Nicholas Pileggi:
Tony “the Ant” Spilotro grew up in a two-story wooden gray bungalow in an Italian neighborhood just a few blocks from Lefty [Rosenthal’s] home. Tony and his five brothers – Vincent, Victor, Patrick, Johnny, and Michael – slept in one room in three sets of bunk beds.
Tony’s father, Patsy, owned Patsy’s Restaurant at the corner of Grand and Ogden Avenues. It was a small place famous for homemade meatballs that attracted customers from all over town, including Outfit guys like Tony Accardo, Paul “the Waiter” Ricca, Sam Giancana, Gussie Alex, and Jackie Cerone. Patsy’s parking lot was often used for mob meetings.
*
Tony said he never saw anybody as tough as Billy McCarthy.
“Finally, Tony said he dragged Billy over to a workbench and put his head in a vise and he started screwing it tighter and tighter,” [said Frank Cullotta.]
“He said while Phil [Alderisio] and Chuckie [Nicoletti] watched, he kept tightening the vise until Billy’s head began to squish together and one of his eyes popped out. Tony said that’s when Billy gave up Jimmy Miraglia’s name.
“Tony really sounded like he was very proud of what he accomplished that night. It seems as thought it was the first time he had ever killed anyone. It was like he made his bones. That’s the way it appeared to me at the time. Like he was recognized now that he participated in a mob hit. I remember he was really impressed with Chuckie Nicoletti.
“‘Boy this is a heartless guy,’ Tony said about Chuckie. ‘This guy was eating pasta when Billy’s eye popped out.'”

Read More

Posted on April 28, 2009