Suggestions Submitted for the Guidance and Information of Contestants in the Public Competitive Contest for a Suitable Design of a Municipal Flag for the City of Chicago — Wallace Rice, 1916.

Suggestion 7.

The visibility at distances of the several colors and of the different portions of the flag itself should be taken into account in determining its proportions, rather than divisions of mathematical exactitude. In other words, it is the effect of symmetry, not the mere physical fact, which should be taken into account. The French, for example, after extensive experimentation, divide their tricolor so that the blue next the staff has thirty parts in a hundred, the white in the middle thirty-three parts, and the red in the fly thirty-seven, and thus secure the appearance of an equal division.

I suppose this explains why all the descriptions of the flag have tortured syntax — the “slightly less than a sixth” language. Rice wanted the white and blue stripes to appear to have the same width, and so they must be slightly different.

[In the Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr 4, 1939. p. 12]

Good, Better, Best Streets

Consider Good street, Better street, and Best avenue. The first two ran east from Aberdeen street one and two blocks respectively south of Polk street. They were only a block long. The first was rechristened Hope street in 1935 and is now known as Cabrini street. Best avenue [named Wilton avenue in 1937] is two blocks long running south from Diversey next east of the elevated railroad.

Walter B. Smith

It looks like Better street is now known as Arthington street.

[from the Chicago Daily Tribune, March 29th, 1917, p.13]

OFFER DESIGN FOR CITY FLAG; WHAT IT MEANS

Design for a Chicago Flag, to be emblematic of a robust municipal ideal, was submitted to the city council yesterday by the Chicago municipal flag commission, appointed by Mayor Thompson eighteen months ago. The commission describes the flag thus:

“Its uppermost stripe, of white, is eight inches broad; the second stripe, of blue, is nine inches; the central bar, of white, is eighteen inches, and the two lower stripes correspond with the uppermost two. Near the staff on the broad white stripe are two six pointed red stars, fourteen inches tall.”

“Viewed locally, the two blue stripes symbolize the Chicago river with its two branches and the three white bars represent the three sides of the city. The red stars stand for the Chicago fire and the World’s fair, two great influences on the city’s history. The six points in the first star stand for transportation, trade, finance, industry, populousness, and healthfulness; those in the second for religion, education, aesthetics, beneficence, justice and civism [sic].”

“Considered nationally, the blue stripes stand for the mountain ranges which flank the plain of which Chicago is the center. The central white bar stands for this plain and the two outer white bars for the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.”

The flag was designed by Wallace Rice, 2701 Best avenue.

This is just a little teaser for series of upcoming posts, where some surprising facts will be revealed:

• Proposed fifth stars for the Chicago Flag, including one that Richard J. Daley planned to “explore”.
• The original two stars on the flag might not represent what you thought!
• How sharp should the points on the stars be? Perhaps even sharper than you imagine!
• Alternative symbolism of the white and blue fields!

Stay tuned!

…worries Brian Tamanaha, too:

How many battles of this sort can the legal system absorb before everyone simply takes for granted that the judge’s ideology is everything—that the law doesn’t matter? Or have we already passed that point?

Lessig seems to have passed that point after the Eldred decision:

I have spent more than a decade of my life teaching constitutional law—and teaching it in a particularly unfashionable way. As any of my students will attest, my aim is always to say that we should try to understand what the court does in a consistently principled way. We should learn to read what the court does, not as the actions of politicians, but as people who are applying the law as principle, in as principled a manner as they can.

[…]

These five justices have all the right in the world to have their own principled way of interpreting the constitution. Long before this case, I had written many many pages trying to explain the principle I thought inherent in the decisions of these five justices. I have spent many hours insisting on the same to ever-skeptical students. But by what right do these 5 get to pick and choose the parts of the constitution to which their principles will apply?

Unfortunately, I don’t have any ideas on how to put the judicial-ideological genie back in the bottle.