EXTRA: St. Sabina marches on MI Av.

The protest. Photograph provided by Faith Community of St. Sabina

The Faithful of St. Sabina parish on the South Side came to the Magnificent Mile on Saturday to try to force all of Chicago to address the reality of the number of homicides, which the Chicago Sun-Times reported as totaling 778 but could increase in coming days if a last-minute incident results in fatalities.

How will Michigan Avenue crowd respond to so visual homicide protest?

I remember a time some three decades ago when I covered a protest march in the District of Columbia – one that passed through the upscale Georgetown neighborhood.

PFLEGER: Leading 100s on 'invasion' of Mich. Ave.

To be honest, I don’t even remember what the “cause” was. But what stuck in my mind was the reaction of people who thought they were out for a good time Saturday night, only to find the sight of all these great unwashed peoples ruining their time.

I REMEMBER BECAUSE I tried to interview several people who were spectators; none of whom wanted to talk, all of whom seemed confused about the point and probably felt like their night out was spoiled.

This comes to my mind because I won’t be surprised if there’s a similar reaction to a protest march being planned for Saturday night – also known as New Year’s Eve.

For Rev. Michael Pfleger of the St. Sabina Catholic parish in the Auburn/Gresham neighborhood plans to come downtown Saturday. Although he’s not headed here in anticipation of consuming too much alcohol and doing a countdown early Sunday to the beginning of 2017.

If anything, his count will be up – and one that I’m sure he feels is going up too high. Although I suspect many of us are going to try to downplay its significance.

HIS ‘CAUSE’ RELATES to the homicide rate for Chicago during 2016. We won’t know until early next week what the final tally will be, but it would seem we’re going to have a higher rate than any year since 1997. We’re likely to have something like 760 to 770 people killed during this year due to urban violence.

Now I know in the past that I have mocked the people who are getting worked up over the homicide rate increase, primarily because I remember back some three decades ago (the late 1980s, to be exact) when the homicide rate for Chicago would fall just short of 1,000 people per year.

Although I have to concede that getting into the 700s (and having some naysayers way too eager to point out how close to 800 we are) is a problem we ought to be concerned about.

One death attributable to violence by another human being is a tragedy for the family impacted. Having so many hundreds of families having to endure these circumstances is truly embarrassing for our city.

PFLEGER PLANS TO try to illustrate the number with his protest march, which is to have people bearing two-foot-high crosses with the names of each victim – marching in a parade along Michigan Avenue. It’s going to be a visual sight – one that I’m sure will make many of the New Year’s partygoers feel a bit squeamish.

And probably will cause some to try to dismiss Pfleger in the way they usually do – just another loudmouthed troublemaker, and when is Cardinal Blasé Cupich going to get around to giving him the boot!?!

As though Pfleger is the problem because he points out what we ought to regard as the problem – but which too many of us ignore because there are large swaths of the city where urban violence isn’t a problem.

It becomes way too easy for people to think of the violence as something that doesn’t impact them, and most likely is something that only affects “those people” who just can’t learn to live like civilized human beings.

YET BEFORE ONE gets the impression that this is a diatribe, consider that many of the people who are eager to highlight the city’s homicide rate have their own political agenda – in many cases to make “those people” look bad in their own minds. Which makes it easier for them mentally to commit all kinds of impersonal actions against them.

Particularly when it comes to political activity – the oncoming era of the Trump presidency is going to be particularly harsh and the people most eager to see it happen are those of a certain racial perspective.

There are so many statistics and mathematical formulas that can make many other places appear to be more violent than Chicago – even though some will want to cite the lower tallies for New York and Los Angeles this year as some sort of be-all and end-all on the issue.

Which means the sight of all those crosses Saturday night are going to be something of a reality check – even though many of those who see them will probably try to convince themselves that it really didn’t happen. They just had too much to drink!

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Are we protesting because we’re concerned about issues, or because there’s nothing worth watching on TV?

I’m not one of those people who sees protesters and rallies as something subversive or a waste of time – even if it’s a batch of people with whom I completely disagree I have always seen the right to assemble and express oneself as one of the fundamental rights of people in this country.
 

Disgust over Donald?

Yet there are times when I do wonder if people put together protests without giving much thought to the image they’re going to create amongst the public. Are they doing harm to their cause by trivializing it?

THAT IS A thought that has been bopping about in my brain since I received a statement through e-mail a few days ago telling me how the students at Bowen High School in the South Chicago neighborhood were planning to express their outrage over the fact that Donald Trump was actually chosen to be president.

Students participated on Tuesday afternoon in a walkout, meaning they skipped class. The statement I received said it was meant to, “show opposition to the rise of hate and racism across the nation in the resulting weeks.”

Said statement also had quotations attributed to school administrators offering up support for the event, in which students skipped class to march to nearby Bessemer Park – where they partook in a rally that WLS-TV reported was to express opposition to harassment of people who are black or immigrant or not otherwise of an image that Trump-types might want to believe doesn’t belong here.

It sounds like a noble cause. It even uses the tactic that younger students have used often before to try to express themselves – the walkout. Yet I can’t help but wonder how many people are going to view this as just a chance for people to get out of a geometry class they wouldn’t have paid much attention to anyway?

PARTICULARLY SINCE PROTESTS related to disappointment that we as a society could really be stupid enough to elect Trump president have been done elsewhere, and with greater effect.

This really comes off as an attempt that plays as too little, too late – something that would have had greater impact on Nov. 9 but by Nov. 22 was old and moldy.

Which is similar to how I’m perceiving the protests that we’re told will take place Friday along Michigan Avenue; the place for people who want to be seen shopping -- real people shop elsewhere.

 

Refusing to forget Laquan

Friday, of course, is “Black Friday,” the date upon which retailers go into the black financially for the year – making all their sales during December as pure profit.

FOR THOSE WHO think back to last year, activists concerned with the shootings by police of too many young black men used the day to stage protests downtown – hoping to gain attention to their cause by disrupting all the holiday shopping that took place.

They’re hoping for an encore, saying they’ll be out there again. They’re going to demand that people LISTEN to them and feel a reaction. Which is a problem, because one of the realities of freedom of expression is that you have a right to say or think what you want – but you don’t get a guarantee of the last word.

Also, people have the right to choose to ignore you if they wish.

Which is what I suspect will happen on Friday. We’ll get the sight of several holiday shoppers going to extremes to ignore what is being said – particularly if it tries to keep reminding us of Laquan McDonald; the young man whose videotaped shooting death by police left some appalled, but others feeling empathy for police.

I CAN SENSE how some people are going to feel it’s the same old trash talk being spewed. A repeat of the same ol’ day we experienced last year – only not in a cute and funny way like in the movie “Groundhog Day.”

The extent to which many people will be concerned

I sense a public relations disaster in the making, particularly if incidents arise that cause police to try to take anyone into custody. Could we get the sight of holiday shoppers cheering for the police while activists try to make their case against violence?

Not that I’ll be anywhere near this. For I have to confess to detesting the whole idea of holiday shopping beginning so soon. As you read this, I may be preparing myself for a holiday feast that my father is actually starting to prepare as I write this Wednesday afternoon.

Either that, or I’ll be taking a desperately needed nap – the only “cause” I’ll be promoting on this holiday of thanks.

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Tribune Tower to join Wrigley Building as not being the same once sold off

Driving north through downtown and over the Chicago River onto that strip of road known as the “Magnificent Mile,” one encounters those two towering structures that create such a grand entrance.



Something will be lost when Wrigley isn't Wrigley and Tribune isn't Tribune

We have the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower. Across the street from each other, for decades they gave the impression to all who entered the area that this was a classic portion of Chicago.

IT MAY WELL be the one point within Chicago (which is barely over 175 years old) that one could mistake for those centuries-old structures that give many cities overseas their sense of wonder and history.

So what does it mean that pretty soon, there’s a good chance that neither structure will serve the purpose for which it was originally built.

The Wrigley Building that served as corporate offices for the Wrigley Co. (chewing gum, and for many years the Chicago Cubs) was sold off in 2011 to the Zeller Realty Group and the founders of Groupon. A plug by Sinatra in "My Kind of Town" wasn't enough to save it.

Now, Tribune Media (the broadcast end of the old Tribune Co.) says it wants to sell off the gothic tower that it commissioned in an international architecture contest and where it has been based since 1925.

NINE DECADES WORTH of being the headquarters of Col. Robert McCormick’s media empire that included the Chicago Tribune, its printing facilities and the studios of WGN – both radio and television (although the latter moved to their Bradley Place studios decades ago).

Moving up along Michigan (Avenue that is) back in the past

Literally, the company says it has hired Eastdil Secured to do studies to figure out just who, if anyone, would be interested in buying the building from the media company.

No word on how quickly anything could happen – although anyone who has been paying attention knows that there has been speculation for decades that the day would come when the Chicago Tribune would no longer operate out of the Tribune Tower.

Considering the newspaper already publishes (as in physically prints the paper) from a massive complex on Chicago Avenue just northwest of the downtown area, perhaps we should wonder why this move didn’t happen much earlier.

BUT WHAT HAPPENS when the Wrigley Building literally has nothing more to do with the Wrigley Co., AND when Tribune Tower becomes just a 36-story, 462-foot-tall building for corporate entities that have a taste for the overly-grandiose when it comes to office space.

Or worse yet, filled up with more retail space so that we won’t be able to distinguish the Tribune Tower from any other storefront along Michigan Avenue.

What becomes of all those stones collected from historic sites around the world? Will they merely make for a more eccentric Gap? You can “remember the Alamo” by seeing the stone while sitting inside a Starbuck’s coffee joint?

And what of those stones that were installed in the building with much fanfare earlier this year – the bricks from the old Comiskey Park and from Wrigley Field following last winter’s outfield renovation?

PERHAPS IT IS best to bring up Comiskey – which has been dead as a ballpark and buried under asphalt for a quarter-century now.

What will it become by 2025?

There are those who will let their sense of sentiment linger on and on about how special that structure was. There will be similar talk about how special Wrigley and Tribune structures were on Michigan Avenue in the old days.

While a younger generation will want to believe that nothing from before their realm of existence could possibly matter. Which is a shame!

Because while I know some deals can take years to complete, I think it will be a shame that the Tribune won’t spent another decade as owners of their own building. You have to admit that a full century there would have been something of significance.

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