Neighborhoods
Dean Wesley Smith
May 2016
The news coming over the big screen television made Big Ed’s Bordeaux turn almost bitter to his taste. He set the glass aside in disgust and kept watching.
Heat shimmered outside the cool, air-conditioned comfort of his recreation room in his penthouse apartment. Around the apartment the city of Chicago spread out, stretching along the lake in both directions as far as anyone could see.
Big Ed sat in his big leather chair, especially designed for his six-four height, his feet up, his slippers kicked off, as he watched the Chicago evening news, watched the carnage of innocent children being killed.
Nothing seemed right. Everything in the world felt off, out of kilter for him and this city he loved. Outside, all over the city, all over the world, everything seemed to be coming apart.
Guns couldn’t be controlled, kids died in the streets every night, and the summer was predicted to only get hotter. And heat meant more innocent people dead.
It made him angry, sad, and disgusted.
Something had to be done, but not a soul could figure out what that should be.
All anyone could do was watch.
He tried another sip of his wine. The bottle had cost him almost seven hundred dollars, yet the flavor he had savored a few minutes before now twisted his stomach as story after story flowed across the screen in front of him.
Like most nights, the mayor came on, vowing to stop the violence, but he had been saying that now for years and he hadn’t managed to do a thing about it. It just got worse.
Not one person knew what could be done. No one had any ideas at all. And Big Ed had no doubt that if this continued here and in the other cities around the country, the world would soon follow.
Something had to be done, but here he sat, comfortable in his large apartment above Lakeshore Drive, watching just like a regular person watched a baseball game from the stands as others struggled with the problem and failed over and over.
Big Ed considered himself anything but regular. Just the idea of “being regular” made him angry. So far in his life, he had proven he was far, far from regular. A self-made millionaire, he prided himself in being unique in everything he did.
Even in casual evening clothing, he looked elegant. No one ever caught him messed up or even underdressed in the slightest. He took pride in that, and the art collection that covered his walls, and the collections of books and magazines stored in special rooms throughout the penthouse.
He took pride in being able to help artists establish themselves, help start-up companies get going, support the right charities and projects to make the world better.
A perfect dresser, a collector of fine art and books, wealthy beyond his dreams, his life should have been full. He should have felt satisfied.
Yet now, sitting here in the luxury of his apartment, he felt empty and helpless. On this hot evening, he could do nothing but sit and watch the news once again report the latest sad death of some child with real promise, gunned down without a reason.
Behind him, the door to the media room banged open. He didn’t bother to turn around. It could only be one person, his good friend and attorney, Carl.
Carl dropped into the overstuffed leather chair beside him. Carl was just about as opposite to Big Ed as any person could get. He normally never got out of jeans and a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. His dark hair seemed to never be combed and was always too long. Always.
Big Ed always looked dapper and perfectly dressed compared to Carl. Yet Big Ed admired Carl for his intense brain and drive and ambition. The two had been friends for decades, and their tastes in women and art were the same.
Carl was the only one allowed to come into Big Ed’s private media area without even knocking. They were that close.
“Someone’s got to do something about this,” Carl said, pointing to the news.
“I’ve been sitting here thinking the same thing,” Big Ed said. “But what?”
Carl only shrugged as Big Ed once again tried his wine, then pushed it away in disgust. Nothing was going to seem right, taste right, feel right from this moment forward. Not until he tried to solve the violence problem this city (and every city in the country) faced every single day.
He was tired of being just a normal person who sat and watched.
Disgusted, he clicked off the news and stood, heading toward his office that occupied one corner of the entire floor of the building.
Over his shoulder, he said to his best friend. “Come on, we’ve got a city to save.”
“Oh, oh,” Carl said. “Here we go.”
Big Ed just smiled as he kept striding toward his office. Every time Carl said that about one of his hare-brained ideas in the past, they had worked just fine. But right now Big Ed just wished he had an idea.
Any idea.
No matter how crazy it might seem, any idea was better than sitting there, watching children die, and doing nothing.
June 2016
One month later, Carl finally uttered the words Big Ed had been expecting. “You can’t do that.”
“Sure I can,” Big Ed said, smiling at his friend who had already downed two bottles of water since coming into Big Ed’s climate-controlled office twenty minutes before. Outside it was another one of those days, with temperatures coming close to a hundred and the humidity at the same level. The city was bracing for yet another night of violence, while at the same time trying to get people to cooling shelters where possible.
Sweat dripped off Carl’s face, and his t-shirt was stained.
“A brutal Chicago summer day,” was what one newscaster called it.
“No, this time you really can’t,” Carl said. “I know how much money you have, and it’s not enough to even build one of those complexes. In fact, just starting it would break you, and you’d be out on the streets. Then I’d have to house and feed you, and your tastes are a tad bit beyond my budget.”
Carl pointed at the very rough building model taking up the middle of the room. Actually, it was four buildings reaching forty stories into the air. Each one covered four city blocks, and was connected every ten levels over the streets by corridors.
When it was done, it would be completely self-contained and would furnish its own power, heat, water, everything. Nothing would be on the two lower floors, but restaurants and shops would be included on third and fourth floors.
Big Ed had worked with an entire firm of architects over the last two weeks, ever since he’d woken up with this idea in the middle of the night. The model of the prototype alone, in rough form, had already cost him just under twenty thousand to be rushed to this point. But seeing even the rough model, he now knew it would work.
He stared at the model for a moment, then turned to Carl. “You got the investors lined up for the engineering companies?”
“Four brand new engineering companies are incorporated and off the ground,” Carl said. “Investors are coming a little slower. You’re going to need to talk with some of them, give them the old presentation of whatever this is going to be.”
“Oh, I will,” Big Ed said, smiling. “They hear the possibility of exclusive patents and long-term sales income, and they’ll be on board and pouring in money, no problem at all.”
Carl snorted and said nothing.
Big Ed knew that reaction from his friend. A “I’ll believe it when I see it” reaction. It was typical from Carl—but Big Ed had always delivered in the past.“How about the land companies?” he asked.
“All set up,” Carl said. “Investors are coming a little easier into those because there’s land under their investments. Not good land, but land.”
“It will be great land in time,” Big Ed said, pointing at the model of the large four-building complex. “How soon can we have the first four-block site under wraps?”
Carl shrugged. “We got top realtors on it as I speak. Maybe a month for the first full four-block site.”
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p; Big Ed nodded. “Hold off on any of the old factory grounds that will take major EPA cleanup, since they’ll take some time. But try to have a few new corporations ready to buy those up when you can. We want every possible block of land we can get on the South Side.”
Carl again only nodded and took another long drink of his water. Then he said, “Getting you in as an investor on these companies is not cheap. I’m buying in as well, and we’re both in a few million at this point as minor investors. But that’s going to go up as I set up more and more companies.”
“By the time it’s all said and done, I don’t plan on us spending much of our own money on each complex,” Big Ed said. “And that money should be returned in time if we do this right. Who knows, we might even make a profit.”
“What else?” Carl said, laughing.
“And after we get the first couple complexes up and people see how this will work, others will want to buy in. I promise you that.”
Carl snorted again, shook his head, and dropped down into an office chair. He put his tennis shoes on the coffee table and took another long drink of water from the bottle.
“So, explain it to me,” he said. “Because I sure can’t see how you’ll build a complex of forty-story buildings without more millions than you and I could scrape together on a good day.”
“We get investors to only build the frame and utility cores,” Bid Ed said, smiling. “Like a big shell of a building with the public and business areas in place.”
“That alone is going to take some major investors,” Carl said, shaking his head, “to even get that far.”
“Not the way this will be designed,” Big Ed said, smiling. “Investors in green energy, green living, are going to be jumping at the chance to toss money at the building when they see the plans.”
“So why only build the core structure?” Carl said. “Why not build the entire thing, walls, apartments, and all?”
“Because,” Big Ed said, smiling and staring at the model, “we want the people on the streets to have their own place to live, a place that is safe. And it needs to be paid for as well, otherwise this won’t work.”
He walked over and took out a square from one side around the thirtieth floor and held it up for Carl to see. “Modular construction.”
And then Big Ed showed Carl everything he was planning. Slowly and carefully, as much for Carl as for himself, working to see if in his explanation he could find even one thing that might stop this idea.
And after an hour of talking and Carl asking questions, Big Ed couldn’t think of one major problem that would stop his idea.
Neither could Carl.
September 2016
Big Ed was feeling the excitement. Things were getting closer and closer.
They’d had their share of problems in the last two months, all the while keeping the idea tightly under wraps.
Zoning had been a huge issue, and if this had been any other city and any other area of the city, the politics might have gotten in the way. But Big Ed knew who to get on the side of the building to move things along, who to get to approve permits, who to get to just look the other way. He bribed no one, but he made sure that the violence in the streets and the deaths that still happened every day would be blamed on anyone who didn’t support this project.
And when that hadn’t worked, Carl and his massive firm of lawyers had swooped in and just plain overwhelmed anyone who wanted to stop the plan with more paperwork and filings and suits than anyone could possibly handle.
Just over two months after explaining it all to Carl, the architects had delivered their full model to Big Ed’s office in his penthouse.
On any new idea that came out of the design and engineering sections of the buildings, Carl had filed patents for Big Ed and all the investors of the varied companies.
There were now more than sixty patents pending for various ideas developed in the buildings, the electrical systems, the wind tunnels, the solar arrays, the water systems, and the rest. These would be buildings like no other buildings in existence, and that took new inventions along the way to accomplish.
Big Ed had no doubt that if this worked, he and Carl and the investors would be very rich just from a few of those inventions.
Outside, the early fall weather was giving the city a break from the hot nights of violence, with a touch of chill in the night wind off the lake. But it was only early September, and there were still many hot nights remaining before they were through this summer of death.
And the newscasts made it clear that the violence still continued.
Through more than fifty holding companies and more investors than Big Ed wanted to ever think about, Carl had bought enough square blocks of the city to hold twenty-five of the four-block square complexes. All but two had the zoning worked out. Six were on the sites of old steel mills and factories, so they had clean-up issues that would take a year or more, but those would be ready in time if this first complex worked as planned.
And Carl had the multiple corporate structures together for the next steps in the process. The important step, as far as Big Ed was concerned.
During the last two months, another of their companies, again with the help of start-up capital and investors, had bought and refurbished an entire manufacturing plant on the lower South Side. It was being retooled right now, with production starting within another month.
It was so exciting to be so close to getting started, Big Ed almost couldn’t sleep. And that was very rare for him. Normally, things didn’t bother him much. But this project was different, very different. He was risking everything on this, and he knew it.
He and Carl stood staring at the model delivered by the architects.
“It sure doesn’t look like much,” Carl said, shaking his head.
Big Ed had to agree. It didn’t look like much at all. Just skeletons of four buildings. The third and fourth floors of all four buildings were connected over the streets, then again on the tenth and eleventh floors, then again on the twenty and twenty-first floors, and then on the top five floors.
Those connected floors were solid and had walls on the outside so he and Carl couldn’t look inside the model. But the rest of the building looked unfinished. Plus with no structure but pillars and a central utility core, all four buildings looked like they were sitting on two-story-high stilts. The entire thing was just massive framework and utility areas and elevators and staircases. You could see completely through any open floor.
“You have the contracts for the tenants done?” Big Ed asked, staring at the model.
“They’ll be on your desk by the end of the week,” Carl said, “and we can go over them. My office is double-checking them now, assuming the funding works.”
“Will the contracts stand up to challenge?” Big Ed asked, never taking his eyes from the model.
“They will,” Carl said. “And all the security regulations have been researched and opinions given. We’re clear under the Jobs Act. And all zoning restrictions have long since been cleared as well on all the sites.”Big Ed didn’t hear a moment of hesitation in that answer, so he nodded and turned to his friend. “Construction on Complex A starts in four weeks. Still think we can keep a lid on this once we start building? A lot of people now know what we’re doing.”
“All we can do is try,” Carl said, shrugging. “But not that many have the full picture yet. We have all the land purchases well hidden under layers of companies, and the production plant ownership is so deep, no one is going to trace it to you or me or anyone connected to any of these sites. Besides, this idea’s so crazy, who’s going to believe it, anyway?”
Big Ed laughed and went back to staring at the ugly frame of the model. Carl did have a point.
Crowdsourcing a building to save the world was just flat crazy.
April 2017
In the end, it cost Big Ed just under sixteen million of his own money to design and build Complex A and invest in all the various companies involved. A minor amount com
pared to the total cost of the four-building structure. Yet it had strained him financially and if this didn’t work, he was going to be back looking for a job.
No one really had paid much attention to a massive construction project going on in a burnt-out neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago until all four buildings started to climb above ten stories in their framework. And the third and fourth floors of all four buildings were connected over the streets below forming two-block-long tunnels. That was hard to ignore by even a press used to ignoring events on the South Side.
And when people noticed, reporters starting digging into the construction and the project.
But they learned little. Carl and his team had everything covered and blocked. And none of the investors were talking, which surprised both Carl and Big Ed. It seems the people who had tossed money at one stage or another of this project believed in it as much as they did.
The four buildings reached their full height of forty floors with the news doing weekly reports on them and adding nothing new. The plans were on file with the city, but all the plans showed could be seen from the street, for the most part.
They were called the “Buildings of Mystery” by the press. Big Ed and Carl and the hundreds of investors in the various projects just called it all Complex A.
Now, Big Ed stood with his friend Carl in his media room in his penthouse apartment, again staring at the television that had forced him into action the year before. Carl stood beside him. Both of them just stared at the screen, hardly moving.
The press conference was about to start about Complex A. It would be now or never. Were they both going to be broke and laughed at for building a massive eyesore, or maybe, just maybe, had they done something that actually might help save the city—and the world?
This was the turning point.
The smiling man who walked onto the stage and faced the cameras was Devon Conrad, the president of the board of directors for the Complex A corporation, named simply Complex A Incorporated. Big Ed and Carl had helped put him in place not only for his passion for the project, but his ability to speak to the media.
Fiction River: How to Save the World Page 16