Ashland-Bridgeport Questions (Chicago, Benson: condos, crime, townhouses)

[avianguy40]

Hello,
I'm looking to move into the city from the suburbs. I'm going to look at a condo close to the Ashland Orange line stop (3 blocks). Is this considered the Bridgeport area? How is this neighborhood? I fly out of Midway on a frequent basis and this appears to be an affordable solution. My life would easier since it is only 14 minutes from the condo door to the terminal. Any feedback would be appreciated.

[Drover]

Archer and Ashland would actually be McKinley Park. Whether you're in Bridgeport or McKinley Park would depend on whether you're on the east side of the river (Bridgeport) of the west side (McKinley Park). The west side is a tiny bit sketchy, but not too bad. Most of the trouble seems to revolve around the shopping center right at the Archer/Ashland corner. Don't shop there at 3am and you probably won't have any more problems in that neighborhood than any other decent neighborhood in the city. If you're on the east side of the river in the Bridgeport, stay away from that little triangle of diagonal streets. For some reason a lot of crap goes down in that little chunk of streets.

There's not a lot of entertainment and dining options in that immediate area, but you're only a short bus ride away from east Pilsen/University Village, Taylor Street/Little Italy, or Chinatown.

[avianguy40]

Thanks Drover for the quick reply to my question. It seems as though you are very familiar with the area. The condos are around 3100 S. Benson. There are several new construction condos/townhouses going up on that block.

[Drover]

That address technically puts you just inside Bridgeport. It also puts you half a block from that triangle of diagonal streets I told you about. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, look up your address on Google Maps and the diagonal streets are directly north.) There have been two of homicides in that little triangle block in just the last 9 months. Needless to say, you might do well to stay out of that area at night.

Speaking of which, there are two very handy resources for checking the crime states in the city: they are Chicago Police Department CLEAR MAP - Crime Summary and Crimes | EveryBlock Chicago. They both draw from the exact same database maintained by the Chicago Police Department. They each have their benefits and drawbacks. The benefit of the CPD's database will let you summarize crime stats as far back as one year, whereas Everyblock's database only goes back to June 2007. However, CPD's database maintains a rolling 365-day maximum, whereas everyblocks' beginning date is fixed and will remain so. That means by June 2009, everyblock will have 2 years worth of data to sort through, and in June 2010 there will be 3 years worth of data, and so on. So the CPD website will lose its advantage in that regard in about 3 months.

Also, the further back your data goes, the better you can track long-term crime trends instead of just getting snapshots. On that point, I've been in contact with the admin of everyblock; he says he actually has data going back to November 2005, but he's still working on how to integrate that data into this database. (He used to run a similar site called chicagocrime.org but the data was cataloged differently and he hasn't gotten around to integrating the old data into the new system.)

The major advantage everyblock has over CPD's CLEAR Map is that CLEAR Map will only give specific locations of a crime on a rolling two-week basis (anything beyond that is available in summary form only), whereas everyblock will let you map every single crime in its database no matter how long ago it happened.

The problem with both is that their user interfaces are not very intuitive. It takes quite a while to figure out how to manipulate the available data into useful information. Once you learn how to use the summary function on CLEAR Map and the Filter function on everyblock, the most localized summary and/or mapped data you can get would be to refer to your specific police beat. Yours is 0924, though you're only 1/2 block from 0923 (where the "diagonal streets are), so be sure to check out both.

Hope that helps some.