" 'What can we do about the parking situation - it is getting worse every night -- is there any way we can encourage Second City, Avon on Ogden and others to provide parking for their customers?  If some of the real slum buildings in the area were bought by OTTA and then torn down and rented out as residential parking lots, income could come to the Association and still provide a service to residents.'  William Benedict, 1840 N. Wells  (Ed. note: WIth the present real estate prices such a proposition could not be self-supporting; but if it were, it would jeopardize the Association's standing as a not-for-profit corporation)"

Triangle president Bill Hyer opened the meeting with a brief summary of the situation.  "North Wells Street," he said, "has taken on the combined colorations of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Greenwich Village and 52nd Street of the old days of the Swing Era.  Today, North Wells has more new enterprises than virtually any other area of its size anywhere -- with a diversity that is nothing less than amazing.  The combined coffee houses and off-Broadway legit together with the heterogeneous antique parlors, hootenanny halls, beer bars, and jazz joints are patronized by suburbanites, collegians, triangles, Sandburgers, squares, rounds, beards, and weirds.  It is giving the area a draw that is unique for Chicago or anywhere. . . . With all its good, Wells Street has brought in one bad element that Triangle families can do without.  It's mostly the nighttime crowd -- but only a part of it at that.  It spills all over the Triangle.  Parking is becoming impossible.  Some mornings there are more paper cups with stale beer or old beer cans in sight than there is flora.  And this new fauna, the unhorsed chariot drivers, shatter our sleep virtually nightly, zooming with mufferless automobiles and raucous goodbyes.  This was the summer that indoor hootenannies moved outdoors . . . The weekend and night crawlers are in our midst and we hate it."