For Sale: City of Chicago

The city of Chicago has spent nearly $300,000 to hire a marketing services firm to investigate selling the naming rights to various city attractions. Soon, Chicagoans might have the opportunity ride the Blue by American Express® line to O’Hare, or visit The Container Store’s Shedd aquarium and Maxim magazine’s Kohl’s Children’s museum. On the heels of the privatization of the Chicago Skyway and Millennium Park garages, selling the naming rights to cherished civic institutions might seem like the final act of the commercialization of our municipality. But, this is only the beginning.

Chicago is just one of many U.S. cities seeking “creative ways” to raise funds and offset budget deficits. Selling the naming rights to city programs, buildings and events appears to be the most painless way to build public coffers and is certainly much easier than trying to make existing departments more efficient. It seems like easy money, but in the long run there’s a catch for both the city and its would-be corporate partners.

Corporate sponsorships have been around in the world of sports for generations, and with each new sponsorship or stadium name change, the marketing impact of the tie-in becomes more diluted. Wrigley field was built as part of a chewing gum empire, but over the years the name has become more associated with the baseball team than a pack of Juicy Fruit®. A more recent example is U.S. Cellular’s sponsorship of the White Sox stadium. Though the telecommunications company spent millions for the naming rights, the majority of fans refer to the park as “The Cell” or even “New Comiskey”. U.S. Cellular is still better known for their painfully unfunny television ads starring Joan Cusack. Unless White Sox fans overwhelmingly use U.S. Cellular as their wireless provider, where is the value for the corporate sponsor? Now imagine everything from the public libraries to the Taste of Chicago with a named sponsor. When will corporate sponsorships reach the point of diminishing returns?

For the city, the money will come now; the conflicts of interest will come later.
The city oversees businesses in any number regulated areas, including taxes, zoning, consumer safety and inspections. The city must act on behalf of its residents’ best interests to ensure that businesses are in compliance with all laws and regulations. Yet, once the city enters into a multi-million dollar relationship with one of these companies, its independence will be forever compromised, or at least questioned.

But the city needs the money now. And if there are problems a few years down the road, I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we privatize it.

Sarge's: A New York deli

A visit to an authentic delicatessen is a requirement for any well-rounded trip to New York City. Tourists in the mid-town/Times Square area may be satisfied with the shtick and excess of places like the Carnegie or Stage delis, but for my money Sarge’s, located in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood, is the undisputed champ.

Open 24/7, and with a full liquor license (a rarity in NY delis), Sarge’s offers a timeless deli experience. The establishment is a literal depiction of “Old School”, having operated in the same location since 1964. A tiered-display of pastries and decadent cakes greets customers. An adjacent meat counter offers take-out options for all of Sarge’s meats and side dishes. The opposite wall, behind the cashier, is a collection of autographed celebrity headshots that span the life of the restaurant and act as a walk down memory lane.

Though the kitchen itself is not considered kosher, as a full diner menu is offered, Sarge’s serves all of the favorites in the delicatessen/”Jewish Soul Food” lexicon. Traditional delicacies such as a nova lox platter and smoked whitefish appear on the breakfast menu. Knishes and kugel are available as side dishes, and there is ruggelach for dessert.

Start your lunch, dinner or late-night snack with a steaming bowl savory chicken broth, accompanied by a choice of rice, noodles or matzo-balls. Sandwich options are many and include everything from corned beef and salami, to chopped liver and tongue. Ingredients can be mixed, matched or combined, depending on personal tastes. Of note, Sarge’s is one of the last delis in New York to make their own pastrami on premises, and it shows. Their pastrami sandwich is a signature dish that stands out in a city full of competitors. An order of a single golden brown potato latke perfectly accompanies any sandwich and is easily big enough for two. Wash down the meal with a homemade Green River or chocolate egg cream, and momentary Zen can be achieved.

Sarge’s is a quintessential New York deli. Stick with the comfort food and you won’t go wrong. When a diner next to us ordered the “salmon filet”, we were certain that he was not from New York and fairly positive that he was not even from earth. This is one meal where you can be forgiven for telling your diet to go to hell.

Launch Pad Tip: You’ve landed late at Laguardia and you’re starving, but don’t want to settle for the $11 Toblerone in the hotel room honor bar. Have your taxi driver take the Queens-Midtown tunnel into Manhattan. You will emerge at 3rd Avenue and 37th Streets, less than a block from Sarge’s. Even with luggage, it’s just another short cab ride to your hotel.

Clean up on aisle 59th street

You won’t see piles of garbage on the street when you watch an episode of Seinfeld or a Woody Allen film, but when space is precious compromises must be made. This is by no means the fault of modern-day New Yorkers. By American standards, New York is an old city originally laid-out by planners who could never in their wildest dreams have imagined a metropolis of 8 million people. Building the city with a secondary web of service alleys never occurred to them, or was deemed impractical. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, Fredrick Law Olmstead was able to transform a 140 square-block swamp at what was then the northern end of Manhattan into the wonder that is Central Park, but by that point New York was developed too far for a retrofit.

If you’ve never been to New York, it is impossible to prepare yourself for the sight of garbage lining virtually every street in the city. Each night an armada of trucks set out to collect the refuse, but over the course of the day, truly heroic piles of seeping waste can accumulate on the curb. This takes some getting used to, particularly the first time you step around one of these temporary hills to enter that chic restaurant you read about in Zagat.

Yet, as the world “goes green”, New York might be a perfect example of what we truly face as a society. In Chicago, we have the luxury of filling our dumpsters and keeping our trash largely out of sight. In New York, every day is a visual lesson on how much we consume and discard. 5¢ refunds on glass bottles aside, recycling can only take us so far. As landfills reach capacity and new projects face opposition at every front (“not in my backyard”), how do we cut down on the amount of garbage we produce in our everyday lives?

Germ-Mania

When was the last time you saw a person in hospital garb outside of a hospital? At least in Chicago, chances are it was recently, maybe as recently as the last time you were on the train to work or in the grocery store. These are just ordinary people, employed in the medical profession, on their way to or from a shift. Just ordinary people going about their lives, participating in their environment and unintentionally bringing everything they’ve touched into the hospital with them.

One of my first jobs was working part-time at a sprawling, turn of the (20th) century hospital. Each shift, any worker who came in contact with patients, from surgeons to orderlies, stopped off at a locker room and changed from their street clothes into a pair of hospital issued scrubs. The scrubs themselves were forbidden to leave the premises and were laundered on-site. So, essentially everyone in the hospital wore work uniforms from a communal pool of tops and bottoms (best not to think about it), but it was generally ensured that each worker would walk onto the hospital floor in a freshly laundered, and extremely comfortable, set of clothes. Did budget pressures force hospitals to change this practice? Is the responsibility now on the employee to outfit themselves?

In other news, there have been a few thousand stories about the dreaded, drug-resistant, flesh-eating bacteria MRSA. [See here, here or here, if you haven’t already.] Doctors over-prescribing antibiotics has been blamed for creating these hard to treat strains of the Staphylococcus bacteria. But could other harmful germs also find their way into hospitals on the clothes of those treating the patients? It could be a coincidence, but if any of those workers happened to get to work on the Red Line, I’m fairly sure the seat they used was not entirely sterile.


Launch Pad Side Bar: For any with doubts about natural selection, take a closer look at how a few genetic mutations turns a problematic, but treatable, bacterial infection into a killer. It seems doubtful divine intervention is the cause.

But I Don’t Feel Fat

We constantly hear that America is a nation afflicted with obesity, yet it’s rare that we notice the subtle ways in which corporations manipulate what we perceive as normal. As we approach the holiday season, full of time with friends, family and sanctioned gorging, I stumbled upon the following interesting consumer fact, I thought I would share.

While shopping at a local “Big Box” retailer, I suddenly decided that I needed a new pair of undergarments. (I suspect subliminal advertising.) As I perused the selection of boxer shorts by an unnamed manufacturer (rhymes with panes), I thought something seemed different. Of course I took my purchase home and compared it to the other contents of my drawer. And sure enough, my new pair of “Medium” boxer shorts measure 34”-36”, where my old standbys were 32”-34”. The concept of small, medium and large has been redefined for men across America. The sinister thing is, most people will never notice. The new norm becomes business as usual.

So, now my medium shorts are big on me. You can bet that I’ll be having desert.