Some of us don't have the sense to see Chicago's wonders; we're losing people

It seems not everybody shares the love I have for this magical land built along the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan – the Census Bureau reported this week the Chicago metropolitan area is nearly 20,000 residents smaller than it was a year ago.

Long-standing cultural institutions not enough to bring people to Chicago, ...

That would be the equivalent of an entire suburban community being suddenly obliterated from the map – although I’m sure urban development types would tell me it is people fleeing the city proper to go live in those suburbs.

FOR THE RECORD, the Census Bureau estimates that the Chicago-area population (including the portions that spill over the state lines into Indiana and Wisconsin) is 9.513 million.

Officially, the last Census count in 2010 showed the Chicago area at 9.461 million people. So we’re still bigger than we were a few years ago.

But the reality is that the estimated population count for this year is a 19,570 person drop compared to last year, which was an 11,324 person drop from the year before that.

It seems that when compared to other cities across the Great Lakes region and Midwest, we’re typical. Technically, the word out of Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis is worse.

BUT WE IN Chicago have always thought of ourselves as worthy of being held to a higher standard. Hence, we notice that places like New York and Los Angeles experienced population hikes of 2-3 percent.

... nor are the newer novelties such as 'Cloud Gate'

Not huge, but not insignificant either.

Now I’m not about to claim that the Midwest is somehow dragging Chicago down, making the city that blue dot on a red sea as way too many politically-motivated maps depict these days. If anything, I always thought Chicago was the spiritual capital of this vast region that thinks the Atlantic and Pacific oceans have nothing on that great body of water known as the Great Lakes, and that one-time Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick sort of had the right idea that “Chicagoland” was truly unique – even if his reasons why were a little half-cocked (or maybe were ahead of his time in predicting much of the region's political support for Donald J. Trump).

Corncobs along the Chicago River ...

I did notice the one demographer who told Crain’s Chicago Business that the Chicago area population is “flatlining,” as in we’ve dropped about as low as we can get and this is the bottom.

ALTHOUGH ANYBODY WITH sense knows we don’t bottom out until we literally become a ghost town – a place of long-abandoned structures just waiting for Mother Nature to whack the one-time site of the Second City with a massive tornado that causes everything to come tumbling down.

... and a gaudier structure located upstream

Now I’m sure some people are going to want to claim the politically partisan bickering that has occurred the past few years is somehow scaring people away.

I doubt it.

Largely because I think many people have enough sense to disregard the blowhard tendencies of the government officials they elect. Besides, most of the people who want to make that line of attack are more interested in blaming the “other side” for the population loss.

This shoreline of Lake Calumet is firmly located within the city limits

THEY WANT TO lambast somebody, rather than try to figure out the solution to our problems; which, admittedly, do include the fact that a significant number of people are willing to up and leave what I will always regard as the most wonderful city on Planet Earth.

Where else will you find streets named for Goethe?

Even if there are some people, particularly of African-American persuasion, who’d rather move back South to the lands their grandparents fled. Segregation isn’t what it once was down there, and our land of opportunity has fallen off as well.

Or there may be all those other individuals who push themselves out further and further away from Chicago’s downtown core to the point where they don’t want to think of themselves as being part of the metropolitan area.

Although I’m always inclined to think those people ultimately will be “punished” for their lack of faith by finding themselves so far out in the middle of “nowhere” that they’ll wind up longing for the days when they were a part of that wondrous urban area that gave us deep dish pizza, electrified blues music and a century’s worth of mediocre-to-bad baseball – both South and North sides!

  -30-

Are we headed for brawl with Houston?

The Reuters newswire service felt compelled Monday to report a story that has been hinted at by many entities for years – Houston will someday have more people living there than Chicago.

Chicago will always have edge over Houston

The one-time Second City (only to New York) will someday have to settle for Number Four – and most likely sometime during our lifetimes.

REUTERS REPORTED THAT by the year 2025, Chicago’s population (currently about 2.7 million) will be 2.5 million. Whereas Houston (which in 2010 had 2.1 million people) will be about 2.54 million people.

It will go New York City, Los Angeles, Houston THEN Chicago. Which on a certain level makes me want to wretch.

Not that it really makes any difference. I wouldn’t want to live in any Texas city, and certainly wouldn’t think of Houston as being superior to Chicago on any level. Just as I don’t really think of Los Angeles as superior to Chicago just because back when I was in college it managed to surpass Chicago in population.

Although I can already hear the Texas-type boasts (that always come across as insecurity at its worst) about how wonderful this makes Houston – except for those people from Dallas, who will probably be more appalled by this news than anyone from Chicago will be.

OF COURSE, THERE is a factor in all of this growth that explains how a southwestern city could possibly be larger than Chicago, or any Midwestern U.S. city.

Space!

A bi-state region with that big huge lake ...

Houston has space surrounding it. Room for it to grow that can be incorporated into the city proper. Evidence that it is located in a region that could accurately be described as the middle of nowhere (just like Las Vegas, Nev.).

Whereas Chicago has been hemmed in on all sides by Lake Michigan to the east (an asset that I’m sure Houston would kill to have) and suburban communities in all directions.

THERE’S NO SPACE for Chicago proper to grow. There is room on the outskirts for the suburban area to continue to grow. In fact, metropolitan Chicago is getting larger even though the city proper is shrinking.

... will always be superior to city in the desert

The Census Bureau indicates that back in 2010, Houston and its suburbs have some 5.95 million people. By comparison to Chicago, which the Census Bureau offered an estimate of having some 9.73 million people in 2011.

I don’t doubt that Houston’s suburbs will get larger and the gap will close.

But it’s very likely that come 2025, Houston’s city population will be slightly larger while Chicago’s metro area population will remain significantly larger. I can already hear the arguments that will arise, particularly from Texas-types who will resent the idea that anybody challenges their claim to being Number Three when you could argue they remain Number Four!

WHICH WILL MEAN that Chicago will have to settle for being the largest city in the Midwest or Great Lakes regions – because it’s not like St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit or Minneapolis/St. Paul are on the verge of surpassing Chicago anytime soon (if ever).

Now I don’t want to come across as mocking Reuters. Although I’m not sure why this is news now. Estimates that Houston will someday have more people have been spreading around for years now.

Just as it was long expected that Los Angeles would surpass Chicago by the time it actually happened in 1984 (New York is so much bigger than anything else that nothing is likely to surpass it anytime soon).

These population shifts don’t change the true character of either city, or the fact that in a Chicago vs. Houston brawl, our city will be able to claim a World Series advantage – our White Sox did sweep the Houston Astros four straight games back in ’05. Nothing changes that!

  -30-

Could Lucas museum be Chicago lakefront’s ultimate defilement?

There is a certain generation of Chicagoans who believe the McCormick Place convention center is a monstrosity that permanently defiled the beauty of the city’s portion of the Lake Michigan shoreline.

It’s big. It’s bulky. It got built in so many pieces throughout the years that there isn’t an architectural consistency to the entire complex.

IT CERTAINLY CLASHES with the Burnham plan of the early 20^th Century that was supposed to encourage urban development in Chicago that would not interfere with the natural beauty of being a city right on the Great Lakes.

But it got done, and we have to live with it. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m of a generation that thinks in terms of McCormick Place having always just “been there.” It doesn’t make me ill because it just seems hard to envision the site open to anything else.

Which apparently is what those who prepared the preliminary design for that George Lucas museum that may someday be built in Chicago are thinking about.

When I saw the sketches of what that structure will supposedly look like (with the downtown skyline in the distance and the futuristic-like Soldier Field within sight), I couldn’t help but think the structure looks ridiculous.

TOTALLY OUT OF place. As in no way that thing should ever be built on that site, or any site along the lakefront. As in perhaps I’m sympathetic to the lawsuit filed Thursday by the Friends of the Parks organization in U.S. District Court to stop development of the project.

But perhaps future generations will just sort of accept that it’s there, and not give it any thought before they check out the assorted artifacts that will wind up on display in such a museum.

My own thoughts about the sketches I saw was that the structure looked like a giant pile of sand along the lakeshore, with some sort of ring casually placed on top. Giant, as in seven stories high – with that ring being an observation deck where people can check out Chicago from up high, like they already do by traveling up to the 103^rd floor of the Sears Tower (forget that Willis nonsense, I’d sooner call it the “Arnold” building).

Almost as though a giant baby was using our public beach as his personal sandbox and built sand “castles” that were nothing more than the content of a bucket turned upside down.

YOU HUMOR THE youngster for making a nice pile, but it’s not anything permanently lasting. So why should we think this design that would defile the lakefront’s appearance is worth any praise?

Now I know that Lucas has knocked down the public impression that this is a museum devoted to his “Star Wars” films – saying it will be much more about pop culture throughout our society.

Yet it almost looks like somebody’s reject of a Star Wars set – and I’m not alone in thinking that. Both 42^nd Ward Alderman Brendan Reilly and 2^nd Ward Alderman Robert Fioretti made similar comments.

With the would-be mayoral dreamer Fioretti saying it looked to him like the Jabba the Hut character’s palace. Does this mean we’ll have a Carrie Fisher lookalike walking around in that skimpy gold-bikini-like outfit worn in “Return of the Jedi?”

I’M NOT BOTHERED by the idea of some sort of Lucas-inspired museum being in Chicago. I just would like to see a bit more inspiration put into its design. Or else this would literally be nothing more than the gap-filler in a stretch of tackiness started by the current incarnation of Soldier Field stretching down to McCormick Place.

Although perhaps we should feel lucky that one of the most absurd ideas for a lakefront development never got done – that dream of then-Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1960s for a multi-purpose sports stadium to be built on a man-made island IN Lake Michigan proper.

It may have looked inspired on a drawing board.

But just think of how much frustration Chicago White Sox and Cubs fans, along with Bears fanatics, would have felt trying to navigate to such a structure on game days. Then getting caught in a ridiculous traffic jam after watching our city’s typically pathetic ball clubs lose yet again!

  -30-

Dominick’s task force put in public eye

I don’t envy the people who will be serving on a newly-created city government task force that will draw the public’s scrutiny – even though the issue it is dealing with is far from the most significant problem confronting Chicago these days.

Will Dominick's stores soon have no parked cars nearby?

That problem being, of course, Dominick’s.

AS IN THE chain of supermarkets that are about to cease to exist in Chicago and surrounding suburbs. Jewel early on said it would purchase a few of the Dominick’s locations and convert them to their brand.

While the new Mariano’s chain of supermarkets came in last week and said it would purchase a few more Dominick’s stores, while also building some new sites for their brand of upscale markets.

But those two deals account for about 15 supermarkets out of the 72 facilities that were part of the Dominick’s chain.

Come the end of 2013 (Dec. 28, to be exact), there are likely to be a whole lot of Dominick’s stores that suddenly become vacant storefronts – even if companies such as Whole Foods or Pete’s Fresh Market come in and buy out a few more Dominick’s locations.

IT’S ALSO NOT the same as if a little neighborhood market were to close its doors. We’re talking about the large stores that, with their parking lots, can easily take up an entire block.

Those are going to be gaping holes in the appearance of Chicago and the suburban communities. Just envision the kid whose teeth are falling out, giving him a smile with gaps.
 

Only in Chicago’s case, there’s no equivalent of the tooth fairy coming along to leave money to help us cope with the loss.




How many will live on like this former Dominick's store?

Instead, Mayor Rahm Emanuel created a task force to be chaired by Deputy Mayor Steve Koch whose purpose will be to figure out what to do with all those “gaps” – as in the stores that no other supermarket chain has interest in obtaining.

WHAT OTHER KINDS of businesses might be capable of using the structures for their purpose? Or, might be capable of coming in and using the land upon which those former Dominick’s stores are built?

The one thing that ought to be apparent is that we can’t just do nothing about the situation.

These kinds of gaps in a community can become a blot that spreads to a major hole going far beyond the lack of a supermarket nearby.

It’s also important because, while this task force is only concerned with the soon-to-be abandoned Dominick’s locations in Chicago, the way the city handles this issue will also impact the way surrounding suburbs will cope with their loss of a Dominick’s supermarket.

YOU’RE GOING TO have the public watching to see what becomes of their former Dominick’s, and you’re going to have suburban municipal officials taking their lead from this task force.

Which means this task force is going to face pressure. If it manages to screw things up, it is going to get ridicule on a level far above its mere dollar figures.

Because Dominick’s was a part of the Chicago character – one of the chains that for many decades dominated where we got our food from. What could be more important to some people than that?

There may be deals that would have a larger economic impact on Chicago than the replacement of supermarkets. But this is one of those deals that people will place undue attention to.

Will a vacant Dominick's be uglier than '13 baseball?

SO FOR THOSE city, organized labor and industry officials who will devote their coming weeks to figuring out how to replace the Dominick’s stores, they had better realize we, the public, will magnify the significance of their every screw up.

So they better not make any, or else they’ll become even more detested among Chicagoans than either the White Sox or Cubs are these days after the god-awful seasons they produced in ’13.

  -30-

Chicago evolutions; Is there now a city that lives on only in my head?

Every time I happen to be at State and Randolph streets, it triggers a childhood memory – an old advertising board for cigarettes that used to have a picture of a man smoking the tobacco product.

Maybe I'm not alone in remembering?

With real, live smoke coming from his mouth.

YEAH, I KNOW. It’s the kind of gimmick that only a 4-year-old would find amusing. But if my mind recalls correctly, I was 4, and I was downtown with my father taking in the ambiance of a crowded metropolitan area.

A sensation that still gives me a tingle in my spine every time I set foot in the Loop.

Although I suspect I’m the only person who walks by that intersection and has recollections of a more-than-four decade-old advertising billboard. They’re really getting their money’s worth.

Then again, it is far from the only memory I have that still registers in my memory whenever I’m in this wonderful Second City.

TO ME, A trip up the Dan Ryan Expressway always manages to cause some confusion round about when I get near 85^th Street. Because a part of me expects to see the bright-red with white lettering advertising billboard for the Magikist carpet-cleaning company.

Those of you of a certain age know exactly what I’m writing about – the Magikist lips. Which may well have also had advertising signs on the other expressways. But the Dan Ryan sign is the one so burned in my brain that I always have to remind myself that it doesn’t exist anymore.

A part of me still looks for those lips

In fact, it has been gone for more than two decades – 1992, to be exact.

It is similar to the sensation I experience whenever I ride on the Dan Ryan or a commuter train and approach 35^th Street.

A PART OF me looks to the north side of the street to see the worn-brick building with so many coats of whitewash all over it where the White Sox have played baseball since the days of Ray Schalk and Joe Jackson.

The "Cracker's" old field still sticks in our minds

Only it has been gone for even longer than those lips! Which may be a large part of the reason why the structure known as U.S. Cellular never gets its due respect – seeing it reminds of us what was lost! I suspect at times even the younger generation (there are people old enough to think they're "life-long" Chicagoans who are too young to remember Comiskey Park) knows it missed out on something!

Just on Thursday I was walking along Randolph Street in the Loop when I remembered the buses I used to take back when I was in college, and the way they would take me all the way into downtown from Bloomington, Ill., to the stations along Randolph, which also used to have those garish theaters before the area tried to convert itself into an “upscale theatre” district. One that I suspect is limited and second-rate compared to the "real" theater districts of New York City. Do we make ourselves look silly by comparison?

 

Yes, I recall how seedy the area used to be. Just as in the South Loop (particularly the area around the old 11th and State headquarters of the Chicago Police Department), one didn’t want to linger around either area too long. Although there’s a part of me to which my favorite scene in the Blues Brothers film were those few moments of stock footage (think of the Peter Gunn theme) of the seedier parts of Chicago leading up to the flophouse (transient hotel, to use the proper term) where Dan Aykroyd’s “Elwood Blues” character really lived.

 

WHOSE GHOST WOULD be more appalled at the modern-day status of Chicago -- "Cracker" Schalk in seeing his old ball field paved over into parking, or John Belushi's "Jake Blues" character missing his cinematic home that is no more? All of this always triggers memories to me of what once was, and will never be again.

Of course, it’s not just places that change. So do even the gadgets and gizmos that exist amongst us.



How common will this become?

Just on Thursday I noticed for the first time ever a newsbox that had been rigged up to accept credit cards. Just swipe your card through the slot, and you can open the box and take a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times.

Is this the wave of the future? I could see how it would appeal to a younger generation that wants to think of money as something accessed through a card, rather than cash to be carried with them.

ALTHOUGH I WONDER how good an idea it will seem to be when the first time harsh Chicago weather causes the device to malfunction – either causing it to refuse to sell papers or causing it to charge someone $10 a copy. Maybe that’s a Sun-Times fantasy of a way to keep the paper alive! Or maybe it can record the card numbers of those people who think it's okay to help themselves to multiple copies of the newspaper!

All I know is that in the Chicago of my mind, people carry change on them when they want to buy a newspaper, perhaps after attending a ballgame on the northeast corner of 35^th and Shields and passing those lips on the way back home.

  -30-

EDITOR’S NOTE: The popularity of the Forgotten Chicago website makes me wonder if I’m not alone in remembering fondly what once was in our wonderful home city?

Meigs Field (finally) to become park

The remnants of Meigs Field remain in place. Photograph by Gregory Tejeda

I used to mock Detroit because of what became of Tiger Stadium.

The ballpark where the Detroit Tigers played for nearly nine decades until 1999 remained in place for another decade.

IT WASN’T UNTIL 2009 that the building finally was torn down. While there are some groups that like to go out and play ball on the old infield, Detroit still doesn’t have any official plans for what to do with the site at Michigan and Trumbull avenues.

Pretty pathetic. Except that I’m not sure Chicago is any better. Just look at the saga of Meigs Field – the air strip that for just over a half-century allowed private airplanes to land their craft within a short cab ride of downtown Chicago.

I’m not here to rehash the politics of how former Mayor Richard M. Daley wanted to shutter the air strip on Northerly Island, and finally overcame the opposition of just about everybody by having bulldozers demolish the runways during one overnight in March 2003.

We still tell jokes about the “X” shaped gouges in the runways – making it dangerous for aircraft to try landing on them.



No more need for control tower on Northerly Island. Photograph by Gregory Tejeda



BUT IF ONE happens to drive (or walk) through the area near Northerly Island, it isn’t blatantly apparent that the air strip is long gone.

The old terminal building is still in place, along with the air traffic control tower. Even though it has been just over nine years since the last aircraft left the airstrip.

I realize that part of the reason nothing was able to be developed on the site were lawsuits that were pending by groups wishing to challenge the city’s ability to shutter an airport overnight – and without getting Federal Aviation Administration permission first.

Although it has been about six years since the last of those lawsuits were resolved.



Tiger Stadium is no more, yet its remnants won't wither away



YET WE STILL sit. It’s like Meigs Field has become Chicago’s version of Tiger Stadium.

Which is why I was intrigued by a Chicago Journal report that says work on revamping Northerly Island could begin come autumn.

The newspaper reported this week that the Chicago Park District (which owns the land) and the Army Corps of Engineers have plans to turn the flat layer of grass into a varied nature preserve with various ecosystems.

Almost like we can take the airstrip desired by business interests because of its proximity to downtown Chicago and turn it into a nature preserve whose biggest benefit is its proximity to downtown.

WITHIN A SHORT cab ride of the skyscrapers, one could see what the Midwest used to be like before all the European settlers arrived just over two centuries ago.

And at only $6.65 million, it probably is one of the cheaper projects undertaken by government – particularly since the bulk of the money will come from federal grants.

This may be one of the most cost-efficient projects the Chicago Park District takes on – especially since it won’t cost them more than $1.5 million in local funds.

Of course, I realize that a project hasn’t begun until work on it actually begins. Who knows what could come up between now and September (when officials supposedly will start looking for a construction company) that could delay the project’s beginning?

EVEN ONCE WORK begins, it could take up to five years before we can seriously think of walking through the nature and assorted grasses native to our region – because officials believe it would take up to five years for the grasses to be fully grown.

There also would be one other benefit to having this project in place – it would bring an end to the talk in some quarters that the best future for Northerly Island is to develop a casino on the lakefront site.

I comprehend that a casino is going to go somewhere in Chicago. I just don’t think the gaudiness of a flashy casino needs to be so close to downtown and the lakefront.

If you need bright lights on the lakefront, go watch that giant Ferris wheel at Navy Pier!

  -30-

What does neighborhood resurgence mean? Or, remembering grandpa at work

Wisconsin Steel, in its "glory" days

Mayor Richard M. Daley was on his Neighborhood Appreciation Tour Wednesday and ventured to the far Southeast Side 10^th Ward – where he chose to show up at a construction site once occupied by the Wisconsin Steel mill.

That’s the one that shuttered suddenly in 1980, leaving thousands of neighborhood folk out of work and jolting the South Deering neighborhood and its surrounding communities into a decline from which it has a long way to rebound even now, some three decades later.

I TOOK MY personal interest in this on account of the fact that my maternal grandfather, Michael Vargas, worked his entire adult life at that steel mill – raising a family of eight kids (my mother was number four) on that salary.

Which is why when I covered Daley’s appearance for one of the area newspapers at the former mill (the land of which is now being converted into a liquid asphalt storage facility), I couldn’t help but wonder as I got out of my car and walked on the muddy grounds where the mayor’s people erected a podium and a tent (it was windy) if I was literally following in the footsteps of my grandfather.

Daley, in showing up at the construction site for this facility, was trying to take credit for the project – for which the city provided $45 million through a bond sale.

Perhaps he should get some. Because my lingering memory of the South Deering neighborhood will always be that of the sight of the rusty, decaying former steel mill now sitting vacant and depressing – dragging down its surrounding neighborhoods.

WHEN COMBINED WITH the fact that Wisconsin Steel was not the only area factory to close when economic conditions changed in recent decades, it really did create a depressing atmosphere in which to live – which was a large part of why my own family felt the need to “go suburban” when my brother and I were young children.

My grandfather



A part of me stood out there in the middle of what was once a steel mill (I’m not sure of what was once where, so I don’t know for sure what part of the immense plant he would have worked in) and I couldn’t help but think of my grandfather – who also was one of my three grandparents who were born in Mexico, then came to this country as a young man.

When he came, it was with the understanding that his labor was needed at a steel mill in Chicago. Which is how he got the job, and why his route to U.S. citizenship was cleared.

I couldn’t help but wonder what he would have thought of the site on Wednesday of all the old steel mill torn down and the environmental waste being cleared away, all so that a new plant that from a distance looks like a few oil refineries could be built.

HE’D PROBABLY LIKE the idea of people being able to work again. Although I’m not sure he’d think much of anyone trying to sentimentalize what he once did – it was work, and he did it for the money to support himself and a family.

Now in one sense, my grandfather was fortunate. Wisconsin Steel was the plant that literally closed down overnight – leaving its people out-of-work and (in many cases) unemployable. People who were capable of doing so moved away. Those who were left were there because they were stuck.

By the time that happened in 1980, my grandfather had already been dead for two years. Neither he nor my grandmother had to endure the economic hardships of other 10^th Ward residents whose lives were tied up in working in those steel mills. But I have no doubt that many of the people who did suffer knew my grandfather, and probably well.

I also don’t think he would have clung to the neighborhood all that tightly. As it was, he lived the final years of his life in a house in suburban Lansing, where he enjoyed being able to get away from the urban grime.

I CAN’T HELP but wonder if he would view the fact that his last house now has a Mexican ethnic grocery located about one block away as some sort of evidence that the grime he was trying to flee was somehow following him.

Which probably means that Daley was correct on Wednesday when he said that people should focus on the future and how to improve the neighborhood, which he says will happen by creating jobs in the area that can pay something resembling a livable salary.

“The future is always brighter than the past,” Daley said, while also giving us a perfect line that could be typed up and stuffed into fortune cookies of the future.

If my grandfather were here today, I doubt he’d be looking to move back to the old neighborhood. He’d also be looking to the future, and how our family needs to continue to strive forward in society – rather than being willing to settle for what we already have.

ALTHOUGH I DO have to admit one thing about modern-day South Deering – there’s a tiny restaurant at 108^th Street across from the old mill site that makes the best tamales I know of, and is the place where my brother and I go to buy a few dozen from time to time when we get the taste for them.

Because we haven’t really had a good home-made tamale since our grandfather’s death when I was 13.

But more importantly, if it hadn’t been for my grandfather’s work during his life (more stressful work than anything I have ever had to do), we likely wouldn’t be where we are now.

  -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.”

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

Higher minimum wage doesn’t overcome Chicago’s economic and social advantages

I wonder what Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady thinks of Wal-Mart these days.

Brady is the candidate who threatened to make a mess of his campaign by actually saying some people in Illinois should have to endure a pay cut because their minimum-wage jobs pay too much money.

IT IS TRUE that Illinois has one of the highest minimum wages of any state in the nation – one that will go up again as of Thursday to $8.25 per hour (one dollar higher than what federal law requires).

Brady last week tried to appeal to those people among the Republican base who view our society from the perspective of the business owner – many of whom would have a larger profit margin if they could reduce their payroll somewhat.

But his comments that it is wrong for Illinois to think it can succeed economically by having such a higher minimum wage than the federal government literally made him appear to be callous – wanting to cut the pay of people who aren’t exactly making big bucks to begin with, and likely need every penny they’re currently taking home in order to survive.

That is what caused Brady earlier this week to backtrack somewhat.

HE SAYS IT still is wrong for Illinois to have a higher minimum wage, but he promises that if he were elected governor that there would be no further increases in the state’s minimum wage rate until the federal rate were to surpass it.

That likely will be a long ways off in the future, so what we’re learning is that people who have no options in life but to work jobs in Illinois that pay $8.25 per hour will NOT be getting a pay raise any time soon.

Unless …

They happen to live in Chicago and get a crummy paying job working for one of the Wal-Mart stores that are likely to start cropping up within the city limits.

THERE ALREADY IS a Wal-Mart in the Austin neighborhood on the West Side, and the City Council on Wednesday approved a measure that will allow Wal-Mart to build a second store – this one in the Pullman neighborhood on the city’s Far South Side.

This new Wal-Mart (along with the other proposed stores that could someday see about 20 such stores being built within Chicago) would be one of those “Super Stores” that would include a significant supermarket section along with the other goods they sell.

In fact, some have said that Wal-Mart may adapt its urban stores by focusing its attention on groceries. It could very well be that Wal-Mart sees it can make money by taking advantage of the concept of the “food desert” – the slang term for neighborhoods that just don’t have a decent modern supermarket within easy reach.

It seems that some people who live in the African-American oriented neighborhoods of that part of Chicago (Pullman, Roseland, Altgeld Gardens) aren’t that comfortable venturing into the supermarkets in surrounding neighborhoods or suburbs, and for some on the Far South Side, grocery shopping entails a lengthy trip to the Wal-Mart store that now exists in suburban Country Club Hills – a town that has developed a sizable black population in recent years.

I CAN SEE why, for someone who lives around 99th and State streets, a trip out to 167th Street and Pulaski Road is a pain in the butt.

Now how is any of this relevant to Brady or his thoughts on the minimum wage?

It seems that city officials got Wal-Mart to agree to paying a rate above Illinois’ minimum wage in order to get the city to expedite the permits necessary to allow them to build in Pullman.

City-based Wal-Mart workers will get an $8.75 per hour pay rate, along with a raise after one year on the job that will push them over $9 per hour.

WAL-MART ISN’T COMING to Chicago for any altruistic reasons about eliminating a food desert or providing benefits to the African-American communities on the Far South Side. They want to be in Chicago because they see customers who will spend their money to purchase various goods.

If in order to get these highly-desirable customers they have to pay a slightly higher wage to get workers, they will do so – even though Brady would have us believe that Illinois’ pay rate is going to cost us business.

Personally, I have always believed that one tends to get what one pays for. Perhaps it just is that we in Illinois have a higher quality of life/worker/society/etc. that makes it possible for our people to get a little bit extra.

While some businesses might very well shift to the surrounding states to try to squeeze a few extra pennies into their profit margins, businesses with sense will realize Illinois (with its dominant Chicago presence) has certain benefits those other places don’t have.

IF IT MEANS our political people ought to be thinking about how to get a larger share for our residents, then that ought to be a good thing – instead of presuming that we ought to be greatful that Wal-Mart would “bless” us with their presence within our city limits.

Which makes me wonder if Brady just can’t appreciate the concept of urban Chicago and its benefits enough to hold the top political post in Illinois state government.

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