by Neil deMause
In the Bulldozer’s Way
And then there were the residents of South Armour Square, low-income and elderly, whose very homes were threatened because of Reinsdorf and Einhorn’s plans. The owners of the White Sox had initially hoped to pull their team out of South Armour Square, the inner-city neighborhood that along with Bridgeport surrounded Comiskey Park, using the need for a new stadium as a chance to get into what was assumed would be a more profitable suburban location. First targeting the southwest suburb of Addison, Reinsdorf and company promised significant benefits if residents voted for the proposed stadium in a local advisory referendum: The state would supposedly receive $100 million in annual economic activity, and twenty-five hundred jobs would be created. But White Sox management ran into strident opposition in Addison. Local residents, worrying about a destructive change in their quiet community, and local environmentalists, fearing a threat to the region’s nationally protected wetlands, were organized and vocal in their opposition. After an unfavorable referendum vote, the White Sox owners turned their sights elsewhere.
As location after profitable location proved unworkable, the team had little choice but to return to the same neighborhood it had months earlier rejected as economically unsound and physically unsafe. But rather than choose to renovate the existing ballpark, Reinsdorf and Einhorn went forward with plans for a new Comiskey Park—across the street from the existing stadium. The only problem was that there was already something across the street—dozens of private homes and a good handful of businesses belonging to the overwhelmingly black, overwhelmingly low-income residents of South Armour Square.
Hallie Amey and many other residents first learned of the proposed construction in a newspaper article. Although as part of public housing her apartment wouldn’t be subjected to the city’s eminent-domain claims against much of the neighborhood, she worried for her private-homeowner neighbors, and for the future of her already isolated community. (With the Dan Ryan Expressway to its east, Comiskey Park on its north, and rail yards at its west side, South Armour Square was particularly cut off from the rest of the South Side.)
Amey was at an advantage when it came to political experience. She and other residents of the Wentworth Gardens housing project were part of Wentworth Residents United for Survival, a neighborhood group that had taken on the government once before. In 1986, concerned about deteriorating conditions in their buildings’ physical plant, residents worked with Sheila Radford-Hill, a longtime grassroots activist, to successfully battle the Chicago Housing Authority for more funds to repair their apartment buildings. From that struggle emerged the fledgling residents’ coalition, with a victory under its belt providing it with the “vision and strength to organize,” according to Radford-Hill. Now, with the threatened demolition of their neighbors’ homes, the public-housing activists were determined to organize the community once again.
They formed the South Armour Square Neighborhood Association, Amey explains, “to try to save ourselves, try and save our homes, and try and save the homeowners. Now we were concerned about ourselves, but we were really concerned about them, because these were individual homeowners, and many of them were old and had spent years establishing a home where they would have someplace to live in their old age.”
United by their desire to see Comiskey Park remain, the South Armour Square Neighborhood Association reached out to Save Our Sox. Some members from both groups attended one another’s meetings to share in their common concerns and brainstorm together.
“We welcomed them and they welcomed us. Made our group a little bigger,” Amey recalls with a laugh. “And we all had the same goal. We were not fighting against progress and all of that. We was just fighting for the right to keep homes for people… and many of those old folks lost their homes, and many of them did not live very long.”
The Good Fight
“We were allied with the neighborhood people,” John Aranza says. “Now, the community there was all black. And here’s white people, black people united for a common cause. The people I was with I never met before. I didn’t know them, they didn’t know me, but it was something we all looked at ahead of us, our goal. And we didn’t look at each other as our background, religious, job status, color, or anything. We had a goal.”
Radford-Hill agreed to work with the residents of South Armour Square to try to save their community from the city’s eminent-domain claims—despite the fact that “most people in the city told [her] it was a done deal and forget it.” A dispute between the governor and the mayor of Chicago over who would be on the board of the newly created sports facility authority gave community activists some much needed time—a delay of almost a year. At a community meeting, Radford-Hill asked, “[Do] we want to work together over these nine months to try to stop this thing, and if not at least try to get a better deal?” Ultimately, she says, “they were willing to work, basically two years, around getting them a better deal. They got a better deal.”
“Our chances were slim to none,” Radford-Hill recalls. But the community had also seen how Addison area residents had successfully organized against having a stadium built in their neighborhood. And so the group went forward, Radford-Hill explains, “demonstrating on Reinsdorf’s lawn, difficult to do with a bunch of senior citizens,” but, she says, “we did disrupt meetings, we had a press strategy. The idea was to make enough noise and be irritating enough that you could eventually blow the deal.”
The group held protests at Comiskey Park and at City Hall. At a mock funeral set up by the group at a local school, attendants mourned the death of a community, reminiscing about the good times they’d shared as residents of South Armour Square. In the end the neighborhood coalition wasn’t able to stop the destruction of 178 privately owned housing units and twelve community businesses. But it was able to secure payments of market value plus a $25,000 cash bonus and moving expenses for the homeowners being displaced. For those who were being forced to leave, there was some solace in having struggled for a better deal. For those with no choice but to watch their isolated community be further destroyed, it was a harder pill to swallow.
“There was a split at the end of the struggle, which, I think, robbed the residents of a sense of triumph,” says Radford-Hill. “When the settlement deal was arrived at between the sports authority and the residents, the sports authority took the position that they were not interested in the community. They were only interested in the homeowners, the people that were actually losing their property. So they effectuated a split, and I think that kind of robbed the residents of a sense of victory.”
Those residents who stayed filed a class action suit against the sports authority, state, and city. Forty-nine plaintiffs signed on to the lawsuit, alleging that the new stadium site was selected in violation of their civil rights. If the new stadium had been built north of where it ultimately was, they argued, there would have been fewer businesses and homes displaced. That wasn’t done, according to the lawsuit, because the homes that would have been destroyed belonged to white residents.
“Basically the suit lost,” explains Radford-Hill. While not denying that individual residents may have suffered, the court entered a summary judgment on behalf of the defendants in the case. The judge also warned he would stick the Armour Square residents with the court costs if they appealed the decision. “So that effectively ended it,” according to Radford-Hill.
Amey and her fellow activists were able to ensure that the nearby school, threatened by flying dust from construction of the new stadium, would have air-conditioning installed. And residents of the nearby T. E. Brown apartments had their utility bills paid for by the sports authority for the first year of construction. But “the residents of Wentworth Gardens basically got nothing,” says Radford-Hill—they received no monetary compensation, and they were forced to watch their neighboring homes and business destroyed. Still, Radford-Hill points out, Wentworth Residents United for Survival remained an organized, and even more experienced, group. “T
hey became a resident management organization. Now they’re in line to manage their own development.”
Amey acknowledges the defeat but not any surrender. “But if you have to survive, you don’t have time to get discouraged. You don’t. You don’t have time.… Oh gosh,” she pauses with a chuckle. “Nothing, nothing, nothing could discourage me. I will just work and fight.”1
The Plot Thickens
For as long as the debate centered on White Sox demands for a new stadium, SOS had a focused fight. But Reinsdorf wasn’t about to let the city off easy, so he and other White Sox officials went from hinting at the team’s fleeing for greener pastures to actually taking well-publicized trips to Florida to check out the Tampa–St. Petersburg area. (St. Petersburg had, with public money, built a forty-three-thousand-seat baseball stadium in 1988—without having a professional baseball team. Anxious city officials actually flew White Sox executives in, on a Lear jet, so the city could makes its pitch—which included a $10 million loan to Reinsdorf if the White Sox relocated—as the best new home for the Chicago team.) But Reinsdorf, it would turn out, was only courting St. Petersburg at the suggestion of Illinois governor Jim Thompson, who Reinsdorf would later reveal had encouraged him to threaten leaving Chicago if he wanted a new ballpark, saying, “It’ll never happen unless people think you are going to leave.”2
But no amount of renovations was going to be enough for Reinsdorf and Einhorn. They wanted a showpiece of a new stadium, and they wanted the taxpayers of Chicago to build it for them. Reinsdorf had always been fond of Royals Stadium in Kansas City, the fourteen-year-old home of the Kansas City Royals. Designed by the rising architecture firm of HOK, Royals Stadium was considered the first modern ballpark to break the unfortunate streak of perfectly circular stadiums so favored in the 1960s. With its smaller seating capacity and waterfalls overlooking center field, the park was something of a refreshing architectural change, but its artificial turf and symmetry soon lost favor among baseball purists.
Too Little, Too Late
By this time, stadium opponents had garnered enough attention to warrant a meeting with then mayor Harold Washington. When residents of South Armour Square went to meet with Washington in January 1987, Mary O’Connell and Doug Bukowski went along to present SOS’s plans for renovations to the existing Comiskey Park. “He wasn’t going to come out for the renovation of Comiskey Park if the White Sox were insisting they’d leave,” Bukowski recalls. “Because then he would be branded as the mayor who didn’t care and lost the White Sox. So he just let the whole process continue, which it then did under two other administrations.”
It was at that time, when the threat of the team leaving the city seemed very real, that SOS shifted its focus—and lost its original core members. Newer recruits suggested that the group take a trip to Springfield, the state capital, to lobby for construction of a new South Side home for the team—at the cost of losing the old Comiskey and the neighborhood homes of South Armour Square. The organization even received a check from one of the minority owners of the team, who intended that it be used to lobby to keep the White Sox in Chicago.
“Because of the whole anxiety that the White Sox would produce with their threats to move, there was this great crisis in the organization as to whether they should get on board and go to Springfield and lobby for the new stadium or not,” Bukowski recalls. “I just said, this is wrong. I can’t do it. So I left. Maybe this was the only time in my life I could see the future, and it didn’t work. I said, this is wrong, corporate welfare.… There was no reason to subsidize baseball. In fact it’s going to be an inferior replacement.… People are not going to be able to see baseball the way they had seen baseball for eighty years. And this has proven true.”
“You never win by appeasement,” says Aranza, who also left the group at that time. “You never win.” What had started as a struggle to save a cherished community landmark ended in bitterness for many involved in their first grassroots struggle. “Go over there and see what the hourly wage actually is, what they’re charging for hot dogs,” Aranza says in disgust. “It’s obscene. They’re making obscene profits.”
The intensive lobbying of team officials and Major League Baseball higher-ups, combined with high-pressure tactics to prove their threat to yank the team was legitimate, proved too much for the Illinois state legislature. In a midnight session on June 30, 1988, the body approved construction of a new stadium, with $150 million coming from state bonds and the rest from a 2 percent hotel tax. (In fact, it was an after-midnight session; Governor Jim Thompson had the clock turned off at 11:59 to avoid hitting a midnight deadline.) The White Sox would only have to pay rent at their new home if attendance surpassed 1.2 million a year. “It was just an outrageously lavish lease agreement, and that has become industry standard,” says Chicago architect Philip Bess, who drew up blueprints for a compromise new stadium that would have been less destructive to the neighborhood and cheaper to build.
To add insult to injury, once a new home was approved, team owners were determined to milk nostalgia for the old Comiskey Park for as long as it still stood. Thus, a ticket brochure before the 1989 season read: “With the dawn of this new era, we pause to reflect upon the past glory days of historic Comiskey Park. Nineteen eighty-nine and 1990 are dedicated to remembering the past combined with anticipation of a bright, exciting future in the new state-of-the-art stadium.” Or, as one ad read in the local papers: “‘The last season in historic Comiskey Park. Years from now, you’ll say you were there.’”
Out of the Ashes
By 1991 Reinsdorf, now the principal owner of the team, had his new home—the new Comiskey Park. The old Comiskey is a parking lot, and those surviving South Armour Square homeowners have moved elsewhere. What was once a close-knit working-class African American community—with successful businesses and long-standing neighborhood ties—has been destroyed. Only the residents of the two housing projects remain. And what was once one of the country’s most charismatic sports facilities is no more. In the new stadium, many of the old Comiskey’s charms have been virtually eliminated.3
“The last row in the upper deck of the old Comiskey Park, the very last row, behind the plate, was closer to the field than the first row of the upper deck in the new Comiskey Park,” Doug Bukowski points out. Even the one idiosyncratic holdover from the park’s Bill Veeck days, the stadium’s “exploding” scoreboard, has a new twist—it abuts the back of the T. E. Brown apartments, whose senior residents must deal, even late at night, with its cacophony. Architecturally, says Bess, the new Comiskey “was the trial run” for the fledgling HOK architecture firm, which went on to design most of the new stadiums of the 1990s. “And Jerry Reinsdorf bought the trial run.” Whether or not he now regrets it is another matter—the new Comiskey has been roundly criticized by baseball purists and fans, and attendance has slipped.4
To this day, many of the original members of Save Our Sox refuse to go to games at the new Comiskey Park or will only go if someone gives them a ticket. “I’ve never paid in the six years it’s been open,” says Bukowski. “I refuse to.”
“If I have a fantasy about all this,” Chicago architect Philip Bess confesses, “it’s that Comiskey will be economically obsolete, which in a way it already is, and that they’ll build another one and do it right.”
With the demolition in full swing, Aranza couldn’t stay away from the site of so many memories. “As they were tearing down the ballpark, I would sneak in there at night,” he explains. “Once I took [friend and fellow SOS member] Hank Trenkle. Him and I went in one night when the park was half down, and we sat in the bleachers. He brought his tape of the ’59 World Series. And we’re up there with half the park demolished, looking out at 35th Street with all the cars, looking down, and with the sunflowers growing in the middle of the field; some bunches of the sunflowers were bigger than us. And the jangled tubing of the railing, the wreckage out there, and we’re just thinking of what was. And I know you can’t live on those f
eelings, but it was just kind of, it was bitter and soothing at the same time.”
Every year, at least once, the old core of Save Our Sox gets together to catch up and reminisce at Hickory Pit, an old restaurant near the stadium that had been the site of several SOS meetings. Many in the group have remained friends and have retained a sense that it was a good fight.
Looking back, John Aranza has no regrets about taking that pillowcase sign to Comiskey Park, and the struggle that followed. “So help me God, I knew I did the right thing,” he says. “And I overcame something and I achieved something in myself, for a cause and for a purpose and for the team. If anybody has a feeling that something is wrong and they want to change it or correct it or right it, in a decent and proper way, by all means do it. Because you’ll go to your death saying, ‘I wish I could have done more. I should have done something.’ But I learned it that day.”
Notes
1. Amey was later appointed to the board of the Chicago Housing Authority, in addition to her role as head of the Wentworth Gardens resident-management group. In 2004 the city of Chicago renamed two blocks of Wentworth Avenue to be “Honorary Mrs. Hallie Amey Avenue.”
2. Asked years later by Cigar Aficionado magazine about his flirtation with St. Petersburg, Reinsdorf explained bluntly: “A savvy negotiator creates leverage. People had to think we were going to leave Chicago.”
3. On the new Comiskey’s eighth opening day in 1998, Chicago Tribune columnist John McCarron wrote a eulogy for the old park that concluded: “We now know, though certain suits will never admit it, that old Comiskey should have been saved and rehabbed; that the old neighborhood around it should have been renewed, not removed. But it’s never too late to use your imagination. Just close your eyes and remember how it used to be.”