Chicago on the Make
Page 49
28. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 3.
29. Ibid., 150. These figures are for the year 1977.
30. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 141–42.
31. Department of City Planning, City of Chicago, “Development Plan for the Central Area of Chicago: A Definitive Text for Use with Graphic Presentation” (Chicago: City of Chicago, 1958), 26.
32. Quoted in Joel Rast, Remaking Chicago: The Political Origins of Urban Industrial Change (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 31.
33. “Things to Do and See at Marina City,” Marina City Management, 1964, archived at http://www.marinacity.org/history.htm.
34. See Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 294.
35. Frank Maier, “Chicago’s Daley: How to Run a City,” Newsweek, April 5, 1971.
36. Silicon Valley outside of San Francisco and the Route 128 High Technology Corridor outside of Boston are two prime examples.
37. David Bernstein, “Daley v. Daley,” Chicago Magazine, September 2008.
38. In 1972, the old First National Bank Building next to it was razed to make space for the construction of a sunken plaza, which two years later became the site for the city’s next major public art acquisition: Marc Chagall’s enormous Four Seasons mosaic.
39. Chicago Central Area Committee, “Chicago 21: A Plan for the Central Area Communities,” September 1973.
40. Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh, 531.
41. Chicago Defender, April 20, 1978.
42. Ibid.
43. Lawrence Bobo, James Kleugel, and Ryan A. Smith, “Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler Antiblack Ideology,” in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s, ed. Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 17.
44. For a broader discussion of the depoliticizing effects of neoliberalism, see Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34 (2006), 690–715.
45. The order prohibited federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors who do over $10,000 in government business in one year from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Contractors with fifty or more employees and contracts of $50,000 or more were also required to “take affirmative action” to increase the participation of minorities and women in the workplace if a workforce analysis demonstrated their underrepresentation.
46. Chicago Defender, July 22, 23, 1969. These gangs finally managed to bring about the long-awaited citywide gang alliance, referred to as LSD—for Lords, Stones, and Disciples. The alliance was active in CUCA’s campaign against the Chicago Building Trades unions, but broke up shortly after.
47. Bernstein, “Daley v. Daley.”
48. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange had evolved from the Chicago Butter and Egg Board, which some disgruntled traders at the Chicago Board of Trade formed in 1874.
49. For the full story of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s dramatic success in the early 1970s, see Bob Tamarkin, The Merc: The Emergence of a Global Financial Powerhouse (New York: Harpercollins, 1993).
50. Leo Melamed, “Chicago’s Future in Futures” (speech, 23rd Annual Fall Management Conference, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, November 7, 1973), archived at http://www.leomelamed.com.
51. Douglas Franz, “A One-Issue Mayoral Race,” Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1983.
52. Chicago Sun-Times, February 21, 1983; and Chicago Tribune, February 21, 1983.
53. For a detailed discussion of the grassroots racism that emerged during the 1983 Democratic primary, see Paul Kleppner, Chicago Divided: The Making of a Black Mayor (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press), 176–85.
54. It is important to point out that while conservatives made the most use of rationalizations that minimized racism and blamed cultural pathologies—most notably, dysfunctional family and child-rearing arrangements—for ghetto poverty, the key intellectual foundations for such ideas came from “liberals” like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and William Julius Wilson. See Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970); and William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
55. Washington was not the first black mayoral candidate to take an antimachine candidacy on to the political stage; another black state senator, Richard Newhouse, had run against Daley in 1975, but because he was widely viewed as having no chance against the machine, he managed to garner only 6 percent of the black vote (and 3 percent of the citywide vote).
56. Quoted in William J. Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931–1991 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 168.
57. Ibid, 71–78.
58. Chicago Defender, February 23, 1983.
59. Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1983.
60. Chicago Tribune, March 3, 4, 6, 8, 1983.
61. Chicago Defender, November 11, 1982.
62. Milton Rakove, Don’t Make No Waves . . . Don’t Back No Losers: An Insider’s Analysis of the Daley Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 8.
63. Chicago Tribune, March 3, 1983.
64. Slavoj Zizek, “Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead,” in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1996)
65. These flyers are reproduced in Kleppner, Chicago Divided, 212–13. Soul Train was a television show that was popular among African Americans in the 1970s and 1980s and featured black soul musicians and dancers.
66. These figures are derived from a number of exit polls compiled in Kleppner, Chicago Divided, 217–18.
67. See footage of the incident at MediaBurnArchive, “Jane Byrne’s Easter at Cabrini Green, 1981,” uploaded November 4, 2009, https://youtu.be/9kCmb6tv1J4.
68. Chicago Tribune, August 28, 1983.
69. Chicago Tribune, October 5, 1983.
70. Gary Rivlin, Fire on the Prairie: Chicago’s Harold Washington and the Politics of Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), 305.
71. The name first appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
72. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 197.
73. Nicholas De Genova and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (New York: Routledge, 2003), 47–50.
74. Ibid., 50–56.
75. Chicago Tribune, May 9, 1983.
76. On Washington’s attempts to reach out to lakefront gays and lesbians by supporting gay rights, see Timothy Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 158–67. As Stewart-Winter argues, such efforts were even more notable in that rumors surrounding Washington’s own sexuality swirled continuously around the mayor during his time in office.
77. Gutiérrez has been the U.S. congressman representing the ethnically diverse Fourth District of Illinois since 1993.
78. David Axelrod, who would become Barack Obama’s campaign strategist and then senior advisor, had served as a key media consultant to Washington during the campaign.
79. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 287.
80. For an excellent discussion of Obama’s years in Chicago, see Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 58–70.
81. See Adolph Reed, Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
82. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 288.
CHAPTER 7
1. Eugene Sawyer’
s appointment as mayor by the city council in 1987 had been only for a term of two years. In 1989, Daley had prevailed easily in a special mayoral election against Sawyer in the primary and then against independent candidate Timothy Evans and Republican candidate Eddie Vrdolyak in the general election.
2. Chicago Sun-Times, July 18, 1995.
3. Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1995.
4. This was the number that a team of epidemiologists came up with; the city’s figure for heat-related deaths was 521.
5. Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 91.
6. Ibid., 99.
7. Ibid., 139.
8. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 45, 211. See also Mary Pattillo, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), which applies this thinking to the process of gentrification in Chicago.
9. Klinenberg, Heat Wave, 149–53. Klinenberg conducted numerous interviews with Chicago police officers who voiced such complaints.
10. My thinking here borrows from Wendy Brown’s work on tolerance. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
11. See Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, eds., Spaces of Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); and Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
12. Evan Osnos, “The Daley Show,” New Yorker, March 8, 2010, 41.
13. Ibid., 50.
14. Smaller cities like Detroit, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, had higher homicide rates, but Chicago’s total was higher than all cities with more than one million inhabitants, including, most notably, New York and Los Angeles, both of which have larger populations than Chicago. This does not contradict the fact that violent crime rates in Chicago were down from the early 1990s; they were decreasing all over urban America, but the drop was less dramatic in Chicago.
15. Chicago Tribune, February 7, 1999.
16. Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Chicago in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000 (November 1, 2003), https://www.brookings.edu/research/chicago-in-focus-a-profile-from-census-2000/.
17. United States Bureau of the Census, “5% Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS),” Census 2000, https://www.census.gov/census2000/PUMS5.html.
18. Chicago Sun-Times, April 7, 2002; for a detailed ethnographic study of the involvement of Chicago street gangs in the underground economy of the 1990s, see Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh and Steven D. Levitt, “‘Are We a Family or a Business?’: History and Disjuncture in the American Urban Street Gang,” Theory and Society 29, no. 4 (August 2000), 427–62.
19. James W. Wagner and Kate Curran Kirby, Chicago Crime Commission Gang Book: A Detailed Overview of Street Gangs in the Metropolitan Chicago Area (Chicago: Chicago Crime Commission, 2006).
20. Chicago Police Department, Research and Development Division, “Gang-Motivated Murders: 1991–2004,” Chicago Crime Trends (August 2005).
21. Chicago Tribune, September 26, 2009.
22. Chicago, fittingly, became the first school system in the nation to appoint a “CEO” in 1995.
23. America’s Promise Alliance, Cities in Crisis 2009: Closing the Graduation Gap. While according to this study, the national average in 2005 was 70.6 percent, the rate for the country’s largest urban centers generally ranged between 40 and 60 percent. Chicago’s 51 percent rate was roughly equal to that of New York but well below Philadelphia’s 62.1 percent, which had gained over 23 points between 1995 and 2005.
24. Mayor’s Press Office, “Chicago Public Schools Enrollment Increases Fifth Straight Year, Mayor Daley and School Officials Say,” August 10, 2010, archived in Mayor’s Press Releases at https://www.cityofchicago.org/
25. Chicago Defender, March 25–31, 2009.
26. Charter schools are publicly funded but operate independently, free from some of the rules that constrain regular schools. According to rules for charter schools in Illinois, for example, only 50 percent of the teaching staff need be certified by the state.
27. All this data is accessible on the Chicago Public Schools website, www.cps.edu.
28. Center for Labor Market Studies, “Youth Labor Market and Education Indicators for the State of Illinois,” Chicago Alternative Schools Network (October 2003), archived at www.asnchicago.org.
29. Human Relations Foundation/Jane Addams Policy Initiative, Minding the Gap: An Assessment of Racial Disparity in Metropolitan Chicago (Chicago: Jane Addams Hull House Association, 2003), available at University of Illinois at Chicago Library. For a more detailed discussion of these reports and of Chicago school reform in the 1990s, see Pauline Lipman, “Chicago School Reform: Advancing the Global Agenda,” in The New Chicago: A Social and Cultural Analysis, ed. John P. Koval, Larry Bennett, Michael I.J. Bennett, Fassil Demissie, Roberta Garner, and Kiljoong Kim (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 248–58.
30. Rick Perlstein, “Chicago School: How Chicago Elites Imported Charters, Closed Neighborhood Schools, and Snuffed Out Creativity,” Jacobin, April 20, 2016, www.jacobinmag.com/2016/04/chicago-public-schools-charters-closings-emanuel/.
31. Jitu Brown, Eric Gutstein, and Pauline Lipman, “Arne Duncan and the Chicago Success Story: Myth or Reality,” Rethinking Schools Online 23, no. 3 (Spring 2009).
32. By 2011, the number of military high schools had increased to six, more than any other city in the nation. Chicago also had, according to the CPS website (www.cps.edu), “the largest JROTC [Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps] in the country in number of cadets,” along with more than twenty “middle school cadet corps” programs.
33. Lipman, “Chicago School Reform,” 251.
34. Between 1981 and 1992, federal spending for subsidized housing fell by 82 percent, job training and employment programs were cut by 63 percent, and the budget for community development and social service block grants was trimmed by 40 percent.
35. See, for example, Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991); Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1995); and William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
36. William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); and Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged.
37. Million Man March National Organizing Committee, “Million Man March Fact Sheet,” in Million Man March / Day of Absence; A Commemorative Anthology of Speeches, Commentary, Photography, Poetry, Illustrations & Documents, ed. Haki R. Madhubuti and Maulana Karenga (Chicago: Third World Press, 1996), 152.
38. Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 224.
39. See “Nihilism in Black America” in Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).
40. Chicago Tribune, February 12, 1995.
41. Neal Pollack, “The Gang That Could Go Straight,” Chicago Reader, January 26, 1995.
42. Ibid.
43. Chicago Sun-Times, May 19, 2005.
44. Chicago Sun-Times, January 26, 2004.
45. I borrow the term from the classic Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).
46. Dick Simpson, “From Daley to Daley: Chicago Politics, 1955–2006,” Great Cities Institute Publication No. GCP-06–03 (May 2006), 18.
47. David Moberg, “The Fuel of a New Machine,” Chicago Reader, March 30, 1989.
48. Cook County Clerk’s Office, “City of Chicago TIF Revenue Totals by Year, 1986–2006,” archived at http://www.cookcountyclerk.com/tsd/tifs/Pages/default.aspx.
49
. The state of California was the first to enact TIF legislation in 1952, with six other states following suit in the 1960s. By 2000, all but three states had passed TIF legislation.
50. For a detailed discussion of how TIF laws have been transformed from “tools for eradicating substandard housing conditions to a way for municipalities to ‘pad the tax base,’” see Colin Gordon, “Blighting the Way: Urban Renewal, Economic Development, and the Elusive Definition of Blight,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 31, no. 2 (January 2004), 305–37.
51. Ben Joravsky, “Million Dollar Lies,” Chicago Reader, August 11, 2006.
52. Ben Joravsky, “The Shadow Budget,” Chicago Reader, October 22, 2009.
53. Ibid.
54. David Moberg, “Economic Restructuring: Chicago’s Precarious Balance,” in The New Chicago, ed. John P. Koval et al., 31.
55. City of Chicago, Department of Planning and Development, “Staff Report to the Community Development Commission Requesting Developer Designation: Brach’s Redevelopment,” January 8, 2008.
56. Another irony worth mentioning here was that Brach’s paid wages that tripled the state minimum. By 1995 activists struggling for a citywide minimum wage had already drawn attention to the city’s lack of support for Brach’s in comparison with low-wage competitors like Pilsen’s Farley Candy Company, which benefited from a $3 million tax abatement from the city.
57. For a detailed account of the making of Millennium Park, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
58. Costas Spirou, “Urban Beautification: The Construction of a New Urban Identity in Chicago,” in The New Chicago, ed. John P. Koval et al., 297–98.
59. City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development, “The Chicago Central Area Plan: Final Report to the Chicago Plan Commission” (Chicago: City of Chicago, 2003).
60. Dennis R. Judd, “Constructing the Tourist Bubble,” in The Tourist City, ed. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 35–53.