OUR RESPONSIBLE MEDIAWho needs crazy pills when Bill Smith has historical analogies?

You may have heard that some powerful men want to build a 49-story tower in downtown Evanston. It would be across from Sherman Plaza, which they also built. And nothing — not shitty journalists, not cracked out aldermen, not rival developers, not fledgling Daily reporters — can stand in their way.

Wait wait wait. Could it be there's another constituency here, as yet unheard from in the whispering fray? Yes! The people!

Or so it seems when you first read EvanstonNow spinster Bill Smith's article today. The plans have "brought out a chorus of critics," he writes.

Then he veers off into journalistic la-la land, preaching about how, usually, Evanston's tallest buildings are about a quarter as high as Chicago's tallest in the same time period. What? Yeah, I know.

And it goes on! What with the Chicago Spire, a huge, beautiful, Calatrava-designed tower going up in River North, we're historic-relationshiply due for a 49-story tower!

What do you think? That, maybe next week, someone will take up how people who live in Evanston feel about this? Um, agreed. Meanwhile, the search for intelligent life in Evanston media goes on.

How tall is too tall for Evanston? [EvanstonNow]

THE DEATH STAR COMETHTry and stop this thing. Try.

Nothing gives Evanston media a hard-on like big buildings. And when you're proposing a 49-story monument to the phallus, why not? That's twice as high as anything else in the city! Yet the people of Evanston remain non-committal, sort of like a sorority girl before she's washed down a few martinis.

So think of yesterday's meeting as a, like, gulping of that first drink. What happened, you ask? (Bear in mind we're getting this from possibly depressed, possibly drunk suburban reporters. Seriously. I've met these dudes.)

"My generation says, I can walk to Whole Foods and Starbucks, what else to I need?" Larry Booth, the tower's architect, said.

He said the new tower would be "an elegant residential building, visually light and delicate, that would combine an intimate pedestrian experience with high residential density." (EvanstonNow)

Of course, you can't walk to Starbucks or Whole Foods without a 218-foot death star to.. assist you, is it? And what the fuck is an "intimate pedestrian experience"? Continuing:

The residential tower would be set back from the street. The tower is slim in appearance -- critics have dubbed it different -- so as not to appear out of scale with the street. (Evanston Review)

Right, because a fifty floor building looks right at home next to a three story building from the 1930s. And who are these "critics"?

Do tune in next week for our follow-ups on the Evanston Plan Commission's review of the building. Or, as we refer to it in journalistic parlance, ejaculation.

Tower developers meet neighbors (Great headline, Bill! Yay!) [EvanstonNow]
Tower hearings under way [Evanston Review]