Seriously.  The city infuriates, baffles, amazes and frustrates–– sometimes all four in the same day.  I say this as someone who has, for good or for ill, sporadically called Chicago a "domicile" for 25+ years.  For years I have fondly described Chicago to those interested enough to listen, or foolish enough to ask, as a quieter, cleaner, politer and cheaper New York City.  True, one had to leave the Second Amendment at the Indiana border, and toss that beloved 1911 over the side of the Skyway, but, hey, especially starting in the 1990s, the place had potential.  Oh, and if you were stuck in the world of finance anyhow, it beat Manhattan hands down, even if it lost miserably to London (and none of those cities are particularly fond of "the Second.")  Having said all that, and recognizing that The Nine just slapped the city with McDonald v. City of Chicago, mark down the date because I'm calling it: Chicago is done for.

After the leftist trifecta of Jayne Byrne, Harold Washington and Eugene Sawyer (David Orr doesn't count) I can honestly say it was a pleasure to have a Daley back in office.  No... seriously.  Hang on, let me explain.

My first real taste of "Chicago style politics" was probably somewhere between 1986 and 1988.  My family had bought a house near Wrigley Field years before (close enough that you could hear a bad call from the front porch).  Tribune bought the park around 1981 and started immediately with the push for lights.  Wrigley had been day games only until then and was one of the last holdouts.  (If god had intended Wrigley to have lights he wouldn't have started World War II, it was often said, since after the bombing of Pearl Harbor Phil Wrigley reportedly donated the lights to the war effort.  As the story goes they were affixed to destroyers escorting convoys in the North Atlantic, but who the hell really knows).  Tribune, no weakling in Chicago politics and the sort of political opponent that, obviously bought ink by the barrel, began a full court press, but not quite as full court as they might have.  In fact, they badly underestimated the resistance.  They actually looked like they had it in the bag early in 1982, but then, alas, in some poorly attended and little noticed late night session, the Illinois Legislature (and never has a larger collection of crooks congregated elsewhere in the absence of prison guards) passed a law forbidding baseball after midnight in "such facilities as have not, before the date of July 1, 1982, previously hosted such events..." etc. etc.  Of course, then, Bernie Hansen was elected alderman of the 44th ward (encompassing Wrigley) and (though I have no personal knowledge hereof) rumor went that someone with deep pockets and a hatred for night baseball suddenly befriended the alderman and you just knew any corporate interest (read: Tribune) was going to get the shaft.  Sorry, night games.  Kiss off.

To give you an idea, I had occasion one afternoon to be present when a pair of "agents" from the City of Chicago's Office of the Inspector General ("...an independent office dedicated to ensuring honesty and integrity in City government by rooting out corruption, fraud, other misconduct, and waste.) canvased house to house to pin down exactly who had privately commissioned a stray Streets and Sanitation truck and what were rumored to be half a dozen Streets and Sanitation workers to fill in a long standing depression in the adjacent alley that for over a decade had the annoying habit of turning into a local Lake Michigan whenever it rained.  I am not one to cast aspersions, of course, but I would be remiss if I did not inform my readers that "Mr. Smith" one door down, had, over the prior five years, filed over two dozen requests through official channels to have the work done, each of which one "agent" now waved around like a warrant in one hand with a badge in the other while demanding incriminating statements from the locals.  The 70something old woman two doors down reportedly responded to their repeated demands to identity the source of the commissioned (purloined, as they kept calling it) blacktop with "What blacktop, sonny?"  I kid you not.  Later the rumor circulated that the price demanded by the errant Streets and Sanitation crew was discounted by 25% when the buyer agreed to put a "Daley for Mayor" sign in his front window before the work started.  It was still there, sun bleached and curled at the corners, last year when I walked by.  Chicago, ladies and gentlemen.

In 1984 the Cubs managed to make the playoffs (let me tell you, we never saw that one coming) and Tribune finally figured out that to beat City Hall you had to work outside the city limits.  Major League Baseball threatened that if the Cubs hit the postseason again they would have to play under lights, wherever that was.  Of course, the most obvious choice had to be Busch Stadium, home of the absolutely hated St. Louis Cardinals.  Next to the "cross town classic" (the 9 act opera where the Cubs lose to the White Socks at the end) Cubs Cardinals games command the most significant ticket scalping premiums.  (I'm convinced whoever figured this Busch Stadium gambit out and got the MLB to push it used his sharp political acumen to install himself as dictator in some moderately sized third world nation soon after).  But, you see, in Chicago even a loss is a win- since winning still means executing your plan in the City (under the watchful eye of the Mayor's soldiers too).  It took four years of trench warfare to finally be pacify the 44th sector, ward, with the Wrigleyville neighborhood one of the last to surrender.  Again, I won't cast aspersions, but this is right around the time one noticed a substantial boost in the standard of living of pair of City Council members and a certain alderman I'll just call Mernie Bansen, who took to driving about in an awfully expensive looking European sedan that, no matter where it sat, seemed coated with a Teflon paint that repelled parking tickets and moving violations of all kinds.  It was around this time that some of my father's friends noticed that the new restricted parking permits for the neighborhood, which had been dreamed up to "protect the residents" from car-borne night game interlopers from (gasp!) the suburbs or (NO!) St. Louis, seemed to flow with much greater force once one had attended a few carefully chosen fundraisers.  Now that I think about it, it seems a little odd that Tribune suffered their fiercest enemies on the ad hoc Wrigleyville neighborhood committee to later possess rather choice season tickets for the remainder of their lives... but that would sort of be casting aspersions.  I'm certain those were paid for via credit card, or if not, fully declared as income on the respective household's tax returns.

Some years later I had this friend, let's call him "Joe," who moved to Chicago from, well, let's say, parts unknown.  Not being a local, Joe asked a wrinkled old lawyer, let's say "Michael," who had been around since Daley Sr. was still drawing air, to help him meet the town elders.  Now, I'm not one to cast aspersions, but a few town elders, including one alderman who shall remain nameless, took quite a shine to our hero in no time at all.  Let me pause for a moment to provide just a little background:

Many people think handguns were banned in Chicago before last month.  That's simply not true, thanks to the legislative brilliance of Mayor Jane Margaret Byrne, who, though she had been fired by Mayor Bilandic from her post as Head of Consumer Affairs in Chicago two years earlier, a position Daley Sr. himself had appointed her to, unseated Bilandic when the Blizzard of 1979 intervened to make the sitting Mayor look powerless.  (Hey, Daley Sr. would have cleared entire city of the 18"+ of snow that had fallen on the city in just 30 hours with a single steaming stream of his whiskey laced urine).  See, Byrne's genius was that only unregistered handguns are banned in Chicago.  How did one register a handgun in Chicago?  Well, first one proved that the handgun had, in fact, already been registered before 1982.  Then one proved that the handgun had not changed ownership since 1982.  Then one proved that the handgun had been registered every year after that.  Then one attended certain fundraisers (rumored).  Then one waited while the handgun was inspected.  Then one got a permit.  Maybe.  How many permits were issued for new pistols after 1982 you ask?  No one quite knows, but the rumor is "twelve."  But let's not forget Joe.

Joe had spent some time working in law enforcement and in some more exotic roles in the midst of the military industrial complex.  If I had to guess (and here I am a good guesser) Joe probably spent a lot more time than is healthy convincing foreign police or military officers in countries with only a passing relationship with what we might call "due process" that he was harmless.  Just sayin' is all.  But in Chicago, Joe had a slight European accent and an oddly foreign look that tended to make the Irish and Polish police on the Near North side nervous.  Even without this particular complication I was rather surprised to notice Joe carrying concealed in Chicago one day like it was the newest hot style.  At an opportune moment (is there one for such events?) I pulled Joe aside and reminded him that this was a distinct "no-no" in Chicago.  Joe merely smiled.  This was one of those "once you see it it is everywhere" things.  I realized Joe had probably been carrying for some time.  Certainly, he was carrying every time I looked thereafter.  Some years later, after Joe had left Chicago more or less for good, I had occasion to ask him why he risked a gun possession charge all those years in Chicago.  He explained.  The key was to carry a very expensive automatic, such that "confiscation" without paperwork became appealing.  The key to making that conscionable for officers was the careful invocation of the names of a few of his town elder friends to establish Joe's non-belligerence, and in the event such things failed to prevent further complications, an annoying but ultimately inconsequential visit to Chicago's "gun court."

I was skeptical.  I am skeptical.

"Allow me to describe a first appearance in gun court," this was a man speaking from experience, I am convinced.  "A series of defendants are called in short order.  For each the judge has a continuum of responses bordered on one side by a simple 'dismissed,' and on the other side by 'bail is set at $100,000.'  For each defendant the distance from 'dismissed' is proportional to the square of skintone plus the number of degrees of separation the defendant's counsel is from a partner at Michael's law firm."  Ok, he didn't say it with quite that clinical vocabulary.  This is a family show ok?  Hey, I'm just the messenger.  I have no idea how full of shit he was.  He sure did CCW a lot in Chicago though.  Anyhow, that's all ancient history.

As I pointed out, after the progressive trifecta of Jayne Byrne, Harold Washington and Eugine Sawyer, Chicago was falling apart at the seams.  The Daley machine was in tatters.  Like a good fixer, Byrne endorsed Ted Kennedy in the presidential primary, but, failed to hit the button under the Roulette Wheel at Rick's Cafe and let Jimmy Carter win the Illinois Democratic Primary (and eventually the presidency).  One is unsure if it is more appropriate to chide her powerlessness or thank her for saving us from President Ted Kennedy.  I mean, when you can't mobilize the remainder of the Daley machine (he's only been dead 4 years, couldn't you wheel out his corpse to make an endorsement or something?) to defeat Jimmy Carter... well... what the hell are you good for?  Well, other than moving into the housing projects with her entire mayoral protective detail to prove them "safe" after a rash of shootings, I guess maybe splitting the vote in 1983 to keep Daley Jr. out of office and propel the scintillating Harold Washington to Democratic Primary victory with a whopping 36% of the vote (after "community organizers" registered over 100,000 voters that leaned almost exclusively Washington in less than a week)?  Washington went on to nearly lose to the once entirely token Republican candidate for Mayor of Chicago.  (Wouldn't that have been interesting?)  Nice work, Jayne.

Washington had been savaged by the Daley machine early on.  While in the Illinois house, he was sentenced to more than a month in Cook County Jail over some $500 in taxes.  His law license was suspended for a period.  Smelling weakness Washington faced siege warfare with the City Council.  By the time he died in his second term not much had changed, except that the strong who survived the period braced to take over.

David Orr takes over since Washington died in office.  A week goes by during Thanksgiving break.  And... it's gone.

Mayor Eugene Sawyer is elected by the City Council as a permanent intern Mayor (no, seriously) and... yeah, ok, I simply can't fill a paragraph with him.  Seriously.  Oh, Wrigley got lights when he was in office.

Along comes 1989.  Daley Jr. wins.

So you know the phrase "Yeah, but he made the trains run on time."  Benito Mussolini was the original subject of the little missive, but, of course, it has been re-adapted many times since.  Amusingly, the little tale is false.  Far from being the envy of all Europe after his appointment as prime minister in 1922, some marginal improvement via repairs had been made in the two years prior, but the Italian rail system fell quickly into near collapse again by 1924-1925.  "He made the trains run on time" really is out of place when describing Italy.  Daley Jr., however, is another story.

You gotta give it to him, sure he failed the Illinois bar exam twice (that takes effort, actually) but Daley cleaned up the city in a series of massive beautification and modernization moves.  People focus on the big changes like the "straightening of the S-Curve," the modernization of Soldier Field by crashing an alien saucer on top of it, the development of the Northerly Island area, Millennium Park, convincing Boeing to relocate to Chicago just long enough to have the tax incentives run out, modernizing the Chicago Transit Authority, and the like, but the city simply got prettier, and cleaner.  The long neglected lifeblood of power in Chicago (Streets and Sanitation) was revived, and the difference showed.  Planters with saplings sprung up in the middle of the formerly barren outer drive and La Salle and the City started boasting it had the largest budget for Fourth of July fireworks in the country.  (No one quite knows if that's true, but it is repeated often anyhow).  Tourism rocketed, commerce flourished, the shootings were confined mostly to the South Side and no one quite noticed some of the highest sales taxes in the country.

Ok, sure... here and there someone with suspiciously frequent lunch dates with the Mayor somehow or another managed to buy a city owned building for a tenth of market price.  Yes, it's true, a two-track hiring system seems to have turned the city's offices into a Fannie Mae like reward system.  Ok, ok, the public schools are... well... public schools... but one can look beyond all that.

Well, I wasn't going to mention that, but since you bring it up, sure, the midnight demolition of the runway at the "abandoned" Meigs Field (a Chicago Fire Department helicopter took off during the work) was a little bit of overreach, but the owners of the planes stranded there eventually were able to hire barges to float their aircraft to Benton Harbor so they could take off again, and the City did pay a $33,000 fine to the FAA.  And yes, there is the handgun ban thingy.  But... the place was pretty.  Clean.  And the (new, modern) trains ran on time.

Yes, it's true.  All good things must come to an end.  Rather an abrupt one, perhaps, in this case.  See, the big spending boom in Chicago was rather debt driven.  And over the last 15 years Daley solidified support of, for example, the Fire Department, the Police Department, Streets and Sanitation (they have their fingers in every pie you know), the Chicago Public Schools (which Daley took over from the Illinois Legislature) and the Chicago Transit Authority with massive pension, health and related benefits.  City pensions were looking at $18.5 billion in unfunded liabilities back in 2008 (that's about the size of the entire Gross Domestic Product of Estonia).  Things have not gotten better since.

A panicked yard sale has only slowed the bleeding a little.  Since 2005 private investors have bought rights to the Chicago Skyway (toll bridge to Indiana), 75 years of revenue from City parking meters (as you might imagine prices have spiked and enforcement is now notoriously brutal), the city's parking garages (seriously)... the list goes on.  Well, Illinois might bail out the city.  After all, the hit to Illinois tax revenue that a depression in Chicago would cause might be deadly right?  Well, right.  Except that just Illinois budget DEFICIT for this coming year looks to be about the size of all of Chicago's unfunded pension liabilities.  Ow.  Mommy, please make it stop?

Well, but the McDonald case.  I mean, finally the City will have to admit there is a second amendment, right?

Sure.  Eventually.  Keep in mind, even a loss has to be made into a win in Chicago.  This is a city that has, so far, spent over $7 million investigating, $20 million settling and another $7 million defending against a series of cases involving the torture of suspects by Chicago police detectives, cases that the city is almost universally certain to lose.  "Dead-ender" doesn't begin to describe the mentality.  Works great when you want to get some asphalt poured, or even when you take a swipe at the FAA.  Not so hot when facing off with the Justice Department or the FBI.

If he lasts until Christmas, Daley Jr. will hold the record (taking over from his father) for the longer serving mayor in Chicago.  It is going to be a hard ride, given that his approval rating was in the mid-30s last year.  Near its all time low.

Can Chicago exist without Daley?  Sure.  But you might want to stay out of the blast radius in that period.  Crushing debt, no clear successor, certainly not a strongman able to wield the iron fist required to tug the city employees into line, particularly now that bumping pensions to buy their apathy is impossible.  A repeat of the useless Byrne, Washington, Sawyer trifecta as factions inside the "Chicago machine" bid for control, along with all the gridlock that follows?  Probably.  That and the highest sales taxes and among the highest state income taxes in the country and... well... maybe you can just keep your gun ban.

Well, Chicago... thanks for the memories.  (Think you can convince the Cubs to move to the South of France?)

An excellent read.

Call it 'A Literary Taste of Chicago'

Lovely city to visit. Once doing so, the traveler can gleefully cross it off the list for good, save for those unfortunate times when connecting through O'Hare is unavoidable...

Can a fish survive without Clorox in the water?



Nice read.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading that.

Long, but worth it.

you summed up chicago perfectly!

Good write.



Took me less than half the time it did you to give up though.  I could never appreciate the parks or waterfront or relative comparative cleanliness because I realize it's all been bought at the cost of freedoms most Americans take for granted.  Crushing taxes, inflated cost of living (yes, it's better than Manhattan, but let's be honest, that's a poor measure of legitimacy), who-you-know favoritism and an extremely progressive-liberal agenda beat you over the head every day.  And honestly, I don't believe in the whole "midwestern" thing in Chicago any more - many of its residents match up nicely with the coasts in terms of rudeness and arrogance.  Thank God they didn't get the Olympics.



So I voted with my feet and such - probably to the detriment of my career,
but a man can only take so much.  At least I feel like my vote counts now though.  Remains to be seen if I'll ever return, but I think your notion of a destabilizing vacuum at the center of the United States' red dwarf of corruption will yield interesting results.  And it won't change, because Chicago loves its corruption.  You put it well - "a loss is a win" - and this loss of dignity has been embraced wholeheartedly as a part of Chicago's identity by its cheerleader-citizens.



Definitely passing this along to my wife - maybe it'll be me an extra year until she wants to go back.



One final question, why do you want the Cubs in Europe?  I thought they had enough gays there?  

That should be run on the front page of the Tribune.

As a resident of Illinois,

my neck is tired from nodding in agreement with nearly every word of that article.

Anyone know where this came from? I need to post a link on another board

Illinois would be a decent state, sans shitcago. I can't tell you how frustrating it is living under shitcago law and yet residing closer to Indianapolis. I know people who live in southern Illinois who live much closer to Memphis than they do shitcago, yet they live under shitcago's influance. I wish my wife would move, I'd get the hell outta here!

Uhm....Austrian is known for writing long, well thought-out and well written posts every now and then.  Chances are, it is original...

Good read.

Fun read.  The mention of Mayor Byrne and the Cabrini Green stunt makes me laugh, I remember that.  I'm still amazed at the nice new housing being built on the site of what was one of the worst public housing in history.

Moved to Irving and the Lake in 84, Wrigley area was still lousy but slowly getting better.  Good food places in the late 70s early 80s in the area were few.  I'm not going to write about my years in Chicago, but after living in some nice neighborhoods and some sketchy, I really started to see how ugly things were going to get in the early mid 2000s.

I could see the yuppified sports mecca called "The Lakefront" start to attract an element.  I would tell my friends that bad change was ahead, even in good safe areas but was called "negative".

Was I surprised when I heard 3 weeks ago that the Lakefront is getting wildings and ganged up?  No.  That the Taste now has riot police out?  No.  Read the cop blog for Chicago lately, it is fascinating but expected if one had any sort of observation.  Left late 2007. Chicago, like the country, is racing to failure.

That did not seem like such a long read.  Outstanding writing and content.

Actually, I composed it right into the patented ARFCOM editing window a few hours ago.

A good read:

IL stops paying its bills.

Great read, thank you for writing that up.

As states continue to go down the dumper, I think we will start to see a flight of those who can move, to solvent states. And there are a few. Check it out:

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=711

The numbers Illinois is putting up are staggering.

Good read, thanks

They always mention the cuts made to teachers, fire, police and public works. Well, that's fine. You gotta cut where you can. What I never see mentioned though, oddly enough, are the cuts to social services - those services that purport to serve a benevolent purpose, usually as an aid to those the legislature has identified as "disadvantaged" or "in need" and coincidentally, those services that consume the lion's share of the state's budget, ya dig?

Great read. Thanks.

Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile

Growing up, I was a neighbor to "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak in the 4th District.  



Anything....and I mean anything is possible in Chicago with the right connections.  That ain't no shit, kids.  

Great article.  Inspiring.  Makes me feel better about living near Atlanta...

Observation:



You are a talented writer.



You wasted most of your life living there feeling the way you do.



Move.

cliff notes/tag for sober read....

Thank you for a fantastic read.

It was especially so for someone who works in the city of Chicago with increasing regularity.

+1000

Done.

(Happy fourth, America).

There is at least one cool guy at the United Airlines counter at O'Hare.





I had a baggage problem and he went out of his way to fix it. And it got fixed.
Great write up, Austrian.

People always complain about O'Hare.  I think these are the people who fly United and therefore get stuck in Terminal 1 all the time.  Terminal 1 sucks.

American in Terminal 3 has short security lines, great self-service kiosks, and a short walk even the to end of the K gate stalk.  What's not to love?

Moreover, customs coming into O'Hare from almost anywhere is... quick and boring.  Love it.

Unless you count visiting my aging parents or grabbing a bite to eat, I have zero reason to visit Chicago.



If only we could just get them to open a Portillos in Indy...

Agreed.
 

 

Just ask R Kelly.

Caught on videotape urinating on a minor, never served a day.  

Bump for another Austrian classic.

No shit.  I understand they tried to open one in Florida and it crashed though.



 

Lottery winners fantasize about Ferraris and 20,000 sq. ft. houses.

If I won the lottery, you could damn well expect to see a full page ad including the OP in the Chicago Tribune.


Well done, Austrian. The post goes straight to the heart of the Chicago Machine.

wow definitely didnt know all of that about a major city in my own state. very good read and education. thank you

Great read, Austrian. Thanks!

I used to love to eat at the Berghoff when the old herren served tables. IIRC, the place closed and is under new management and the old men have retired. Whatever, at this point I doubt I'll be back.

Since I used a rather long stroll from the hotel and back to justify the calories we always invited Messrs. Smith and Wesson.

Great read, ty and you are dead on.

Outstanding read. Thank you!

Move, man, move!

ETA: Texas is full.

I choose to connect through Detroit over O'Hare.

Nothing wrong with the buildings just the animals living in them. Being poor does not mean you have to be a criminal. Plenty of American's were dirt poor during the depression but they did not turn to vice, murder, rape, burglary, and other felonies to survive.

Better bandwidth?