Byrne gains glory after she’s gone

If ever there was a case of somebody having to wait until after death to gain praise for what they achieved during life, it is that of former Mayor Jane Byrne.
         

The first, and thus far only, woman to get elected as chief executive of Chicago city government died Friday at age 81 – some 31 years after she lost her re-election bid to Harold Washington.

MUCH HAS BEEN made about the fact that any kind of official recognition for Byrne didn’t come until this year, when the Circle Interchange was officially renamed in her honor. I found it amusing to read in the newspapers this weekend that Byrne’s daughter, Kathy, said Jane used to get a kick out of listening to radio traffic reports telling of rush-hour traffic “backed up at the Byrne,” so to speak.

But let’s be honest. She could easily have passed with relative anonymity, and her funeral service to be held Monday could have wound up a low-key affair that nobody paid attention to.

Is it really the desire of the Daley family to downplay anything involving city government that they can’t take credit for? Or are we Chicagoans just so short-memoried when it comes to our public personas?

Of course, Byrne used to get so much criticism from all factions in Chicago while she was mayor that it probably has taken the passage of so much time before people could think pleasant thoughts about her.

SOMETHING TO KEEP in mind when one keeps hearing over and over about the low approval ratings for President Barack Obama or soon-to-be former Gov. Pat Quinn.

But back to Byrne, who included amongst her achievements during her four years as mayor a stint living in the now-demolished Cabrini-Green public housing complex.

Her time living there stretched anywhere from one to three weeks – and was a response to a rising level of gang-related violence at the complex. It gained attention because the complex was so close to the Gold Coast neighborhood and Near North Side that Chicago likes to think of as being amongst its jewels.

Byrne herself said she was amazed she could look out her Cabrini apartment window and see her high-rise condo and Holy Name Cathedral, yet feel so isolated at the same time.

BYRNE CLAIMED SHE wanted to offer Cabrini-Green residents hope and a sense that the outside world cared about their predicament.

But I also have known many black people who viewed Byrne’s stint as a stunt and they say that she and husband Jay McMullen never really “lived” there – even though in her book “My Chicago,” she recounts a tale of her husband frightening security when he tried to cook dinner in a Cabrini kitchen; only to trigger the fire alarms.

Personally, I’m shocked to learn the complex’ fire alarms worked. But that’s another tale.

Many of the obituaries I have read recall how she “beat” the Machine – only to make deals with the “Evil Cabal” of aldermen including the Eddies; Burke of the 14^th Ward and former 10^th Ward boss Vrdolyak.

ANYBODY WHO THOUGHT she was friendly with either doesn’t understand the nature of political people – who tend to be envious of each other when the cameras aren’t running.

I recall a moment from my City News Bureau days when, on primary Election Day in 1988, I had to go see Vrdolyak vote. He was already past what turned out to be his glory days, but had hopes he could stage a political comeback by being the Republican candidate for Cook County court clerk.

It was a possibility that Vrdolyak could wind up running against Byrne herself, and “Fast Eddie” arrogantly said he wanted to run against her instead of Aurelia Pucinski because he thought Jane would do something self-destructive. “It’ll be more fun that way,” he said of the former mayor.

Not exactly the feelings of a friend.

ALTHOUGH I ALSO recall a moment talking to a Chicago cop who didn’t think much of the mayor. But when he tried to come up with the line that summarized her, he said, “she’s ugly, but she’s tough.”

Somehow, I suspect Byrne herself would have taken that line as the ultimate compliment.

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What should we think about safety?

We’re not safer. We’re just crummier shots.”

That was the  observation I heard from a Jewel bagboy when, while bagging some grocery items I was buying, he took a glimpse of the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times I purchased.

 THAT FRONT PAGE  gave us the headline “Under The Gun,” and teased a story about how the number of people killed in Chicago this year thus far is less than what it was last year.

 BUT…

 The number of shooting incidents that have occurred this year compared to last is on the rise.

 Specifically, 5 percent fewer people killed but 8 percent more incidents involving gunfire, according to the Sun-Times for the first six months of 2014 compared to the first half of 2013 – which was a way-above-average year.

 ONE IN WHICH people would have to look back into Chicago history to find a period that was more violent than ’13 was for the Second City.

 Now I’m not about to take seriously the views of a guy who managed to avoid crushing my grocery items while putting them into plastic bags. I’m well aware that he was trying to make a joke while engaging in some small talk to keep himself from being bored.

 He also speculated about how wonderful Jose Abreu was for the Chicago White Sox this year. Is he a top-notch sports commentator?

 Besides, a part of me wanted to retort as a gag that perhaps that the statistical combination  was evidence of the advancement of medical techniques – we’re saving more lives of gunshot victims.

 THE REALITY IS more a matter of  the fact that there are certain parts of  Chicago that have become so violent – and so isolated from the rest of the city that it is way too easy to ignore what happens there.

 While also looking at the fact that there are certain neighborhoods in Chicago where violence, homicide and crime in general is so low that some of us want to believe all the crime stats must be some sort of lie!

 Which is a shame because, in some ways, Chicago is no better or stronger than its weakest, most violent neighborhoods,

 We can brag about the Gold Coast (although my memory of a quarter-century of news stories I wrote about includes people who were shot and killed there too) and try to pretend that Englewood is an alien land.

 BUT THAT KIND of  rhetoric just makes us all seem foolish. Besides, even if the number of people killed is on the decline, there’s still the reality that even one homicide is one too many.

 And to the people directly impacted by the list of the deceased, that one is all that matters. Too many families get devastated, then forgotten about in the mess of murder statistics that are being compiled.

 The sad part is that just the other day, I stumbled across some four-decade-old reruns of “Good Times,” the show where Jimmie Walker tried to become the clown prince of the Chicago ghetto and public housing.

 The episodes I saw were the two-part tale of where Walker’s “J.J.” character was shot by a streetgang member who was trying to recruit/pressure him into joining the “gang.”

 FOR A COMEDY television series, it was way too real. For J.J.’s gunman, gang leader “Mad Dog” wound up getting probation for the shooting because there was no space available to hold him either at the youth home in St. Charles or at the Cook County Jail.

 Those are a set of circumstances that were all too real in 1970s Chicago, and remain true today. How many “Mad Dogs” (his real name was supposed to be “Cleon”) are being produced by the rising numbers of shootings occurring in Chicago?

 

And isn’t that a more significant problem than however many homicides are occurring? You want numbers, check out 11, 25 and .312 – the home run total, runs batted in and batting average for Abreu during the month of June.

 They’re less depressing to think about.

 

 -30-

Is the Playboy Club’s place in Chicago a couple of lines in the history books?

It seems that Hugh Hefner is making a serious bet that the proposed television show “The Playboy Club” will be a success.

The program to air this autumn on NBC is set at the Playboy Club of old on Walton Street back in the early 1960s when the concept of waitresses showing ample cleavage (with uniforms designed in a way to push-up and accentuate their assets even further) was something new.

IF THE PROGRAM becomes a success (it is supposed to be about the culture clashes that were beginning to take place in those early years of the decade), I could well see some people wanting to check out “the real thing.”

They’re going to want to go to the Playboy Club to see if it is truly as lush, luxurious, elegant and sophisticated as Hefner always claimed it was – or if it is really nothing more than tacky kitsch.

The reality, of course, is that the Playboy Club is nothing. The club in Chicago closed down in 1986 (which also was the year that I first could have legally entered the club – I never went), along with all the other large-city clubs. It took a few foreign sites to keep the brand name going, but even those have all been gone since 1991.

So there’s nowhere to go.

UNTIL EARLY NEXT year, perhaps.

For it seems that Playboy Enterprises Inc. is working out a deal by which a private company would operate a nightclub that would be allowed to use the name “Playboy Club.” It won’t be run by anyone connected with Playboy, but they’ll get a share of the proceeds in exchange for use of the brand name.

Crain’s Chicago Business reported Monday that Boston-based Tremont Realty Capital LLC is the company that would operate the club, and that they are considering a one-time mansion on Dearborn Avenue just south of Division Street.



Can a modern-day namesake match the original Playboy Club image?



So the new Playboy Club would be a part of the Gold Coast neighborhood. It would be just a couple of blocks from the original club on Walton, and just about five blocks from the old State Parkway mansion where Hefner himself presided during his Chicago years.

CLOSE YOUR EYES, envision a few decades past, and you could almost envision Hefner walking these very same streets – on those occasions when he wasn’t holed up in his office, engaged in an all-night binge putting together the magazine, followed by a mid-day romp with a bunny or two.

The key word in this paragraph being “almost.”

Because somehow, I can’t help but think that the idea of a sexy, but sophisticated nightclub is passé – if not a complete contradiction of terms.

Not that sex won’t sell. But I’m wondering how many people of today will walk into a Playboy Club and will think the waitresses are wearing bathing suits with funny ears? Compare it to a “Hooter’s Girl” and that’s probably what many people are going to think.

IS THE PLAYBOY of old still sexy enough? Or perhaps the real question is, Do things have to become raunchy these days before they are considered titillating?

I couldn’t help but notice the observation of Wirtz Beverage Group Chairman Rocky Wirtz, whose father rented to Hefner the site of the original Playboy Club. He thinks the whole Playboy image is irrelevant to people under 30.

While at 58, he still recalls what Playboy once was, he told Crains, “You don’t want to open a place that would attract my age group.”

I could see a club that people visit once, just to see if it really is an over-luxurious orgy. When they figure out it isn’t, they’ll quit coming back. Which means I could see the new Playboy Club being gone within a year.

AND THAT’S ONLY if the television show becomes a hit. If it winds up flopping to the point where it doesn’t even last five episodes, I could see where the brand name becomes a serious drag on the club.

They won’t be able to ditch the name quickly enough.

Will a new Playboy Club be the butt of as many wisecracks as New Comiskey Park was? Photograph provided by State of Illinois.

For the old-timers, there will be nothing more enjoyable for them to do than to compare this new club to the original Playboy Club, and list all the ways in which the 21^st Century version pales in comparison to the original.

It won’t matter how nice a place the club might be or what luxuries it will offer. The modern reality will fall short of the sepia-covered memories of the “real” Playboy Club.

IT’S NOT LIKE we in Chicago aren’t familiar with this phenomenon. Take the Chicago White Sox, who began playing in a new stadium with modern amenities some 20 years ago, and even put the same name – Comiskey Park – on the building as the old stadium carried.

Even though the old building had its flaws, the old-timers will still insist that the new building falls far short.

Which makes me wonder if “Playboy Club” will become to sex what the White Sox became to stadiums – something that can never live up to the original.

Perhaps it is best to leave the Playboy Club imagery in its place in Chicago history books.

  -30-

Cabrini-Green – R.I.P. (& good riddance)

The Cabrini-Green public housing complex on the Near North Side, like all the other high-rise public housing units that sprung up throughout the South and West sides, was a pit. Nobody lived there by choice.



Will Chicago even try to remember this mistaken attempt at isolation?

It was part of a failed attempt to house the less fortunate among us, whose real purpose was to isolate those people in distant pockets of the city where the rest of us Chicagoans could ignore them. A part of me thinks that we, as a society, should be ashamed that we ever let people live under such conditions.

SO LEARNING THAT the final resident of Cabrini-Green was to leave the Near North Side complex, and that all physical traces of the high-rises will soon be gone, is a positive for Chicago. Sort of.

Even though the places where these public housing residents were moved to aren’t exactly ritzy, they are bound to be an improvement over the collection of poverty that one found in the public housing high-rises – which always struck me as resembling prisons.

In fact, that probably is the best characterization of the structures. They were there to incarcerate people who didn’t have criminal convictions (or were perhaps in between prison sentences), but whom we didn’t want living among us.

Anyone who thinks I’m being overly cynical in taking such an attitude ought to read some of the Internet commentary that is sprouting up. There are many people whose biggest concerns are that these public housing residents may now be living near them.

WE’RE ALSO GETTING the rants from people who object to anyone being able to live in public housing, complaining it is now their own money (as in tax dollars) that is paying for undesirable people to be their new neighbors.

All of which means that I have mixed feelings about the demise of Cabrini-Green – which at its peak consisted of 23 high-rise apartment buildings containing more than 15,000 residents.

I can understand the reluctance of some people to move from there, even though I know their lot in life will improve by getting away from the concentration of narcotics and streetgangs that dominated the local lifestyle.

Not that they’re getting away from those problems altogether. They are everywhere. It just won’t be as intense as it was in the high-rises.

BUT I DO understand why those residents feared that the only reason city officials showed any interest in their fate was because the actual land upon which Cabrini-Green stood was SO CLOSE to the Gold Coast, Michigan Avenue and the Near North Side (some of Chicago’s most elite real estate).

They were correct in thinking that the interest had nothing to do with their own well-being (like I wrote earlier, if we cared about their well-being, we as a society never would have created the high-rises to begin with).

I got my chuckle from reading the Chicago Sun-Times account of the last Cabrini-Green resident. She is being moved to a smaller-scale Chicago Housing Authority complex south of U.S. Cellular Field, and complains that the area is a “food desert.”

She’s right. There won’t be any nearby supermarkets, compared to Cabrini where residents could shop at that Jewel-Osco supermarket located just to the east on Division Street.

OF COURSE, THAT was a source of tension at times for area residents, since that is a store frequented by Gold Coast residents as well (except for those who preferred the neighborhood Treasure Island grocery store that used to be on Clark Street). Many of them didn’t care for the interaction between the two that would occur.

It is probably another reason why some people may be glad that the housing complex honoring the memory of Mother Cabrini and former Gov. Dwight Green is gone. You won’t have to feel pangs of guilt while grocery shopping, although I suspect many of the people who most strongly felt this way never felt guilt.

Although it was that very proximity to the Near North Side that caused then-Mayor Jane Byrne to use Cabrini-Green for her stunt in 1981 when she “moved” to the housing complex for a month or so, in hopes that her presence might reduce the violence.

So while I realize that, as a whole, Chicago has potential to improve by eliminating these high-rises, I know that anyone who portrays this story as being that simple is being simple-minded themselves.

I ONLY WONDER how future generations will remember what once stood between Evergreen Avenue, Sedgwick Street, Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street – since I would expect developers to obliterate any traces of what has existed for the past seven decades.

I only hope that Hollywood and television don’t control that image. Because there are bound to be copies of that 1992 horror film “Candyman” (set in Cabrini-Green) that get aired on “bad movie nights.”

Then, there is “Good Times,” that staple of 1970s television that used to be CBS’ competition to “Happy Days” on ABC. The opening credits of that situation comedy set in a public housing complex in Chicago clearly singled out Cabrini-Green – although it was never mentioned by name.

I’d hate for people to think that the real-life of Cabrini-Green had anything to do with Jimmie Walker, or “Dyn-o-mite!” or those re-runs that crop up every night on “Me-TV.”

  -30-

EDITOR'S NOTE:  R.I.P., Dantrell Davis.