Three Chicago neighborhoods are up against a sports stadium problem this year. But that may be the only thing they have in common.
The three communities are as different as can be, and so is the way each has managed to cope, or not cope, with its stadium question.
The differences point up something fascinating, and perhaps a bit sad, about the state of neighborhood politics here.
In Chicago, it seems, the importance of your problem depends not on the severity of your situation, but on who you are and where you live.
The neighborhood up against the biggest threat–the South Side community that`s about to be bulldozed to make way for a new White Sox stadium–has failed to find any political voice. As a result, its residents have won almost no attention from public officials or from the downtown media.
The neighborhood up against a far less menacing problem–the North Side community fighting installation of lights at Wrigley Field–has, by contrast, stymied night baseball by adroitly working the city`s political and media levers.
The third neighborhood–the desperately poor West Side community projected as a site for a new Bears football stadium–is somewhere in between. Residents there are divided over whether a new stadium would be a curse or a blessing. One side has learned, however, that you get more attention in Chicago by cursing than by blessing.
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In some ways the most interesting neighborhood is the one that has made the least noise.
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This is the community immediately south of Comiskey Park. It is a predominantly black, marginally middle-class neighborhood of first-time homeowners. Many are pensioners living in two-flat balloon-frames with the upstairs apartments rented to relatives or in-laws.
There are about 50 houses, 200 residents and a handful of businesses in the stadium condemnation zone set up last December by the Illinois General Assembly. The exact number is uncertain because nobody, not even a planner from City Hall, has bothered to count.
”We`re used to being ignored,” said Johnie Mae Thurmond, secretary of the Community Block Club that serves the 3500-3700 blocks of South Princeton Avenue.
Indeed, the tidy blocks south of Comiskey are a kind of no-man`s land between heavily Irish Bridgeport across the Conrail tracks to the west and the all-black public housing projects to the east across the Dan Ryan Expressway. The one time that neighbors did try to call attention to their plight was Jan. 19, a Monday. That was the day Gov. James Thompson and Mayor Harold Washington went to Comiskey Park for a home-plate ceremony at which Thompson signed the legislation that will cause the new stadium to be built–and the houses to be torn down.
At the time, Thurmond said, all she and her neighbors knew about the stadium plan was what they had read in newspapers a month earlier.
They learned about the bill-signing ceremony only because somebody heard about it on the radio. So they gathered over the weekend in the kitchen of neighbor Lillian Brown, tore up a bunch of cardboard soda-pop cartons and hand-lettered some protest signs with Magic Markers.
On Monday they picketed silently in the cold outside Comiskey Park. It was an amateurish demonstration, but Thurmond and friends did manage to buttonhole some of the reporters and television crews on their way inside to cover the bill-signing. Even the mayor stopped to chat, and he promised to meet with the Comiskey neighbors in his office.
To his credit, Harold Washington did hold that one meeting. According to Thurmond, the mayor assured them that they would be fairly compensated when the time came for them to move. Nothing else could be promised, the mayor said, because the city-state authority that will build the ballpark won`t technically exist until July 1, when the legislation takes effect.
But that was February, Thurmond said, and they`ve been told nothing since –not by the mayor, not by his department heads, not by their alderman, Patrick Huels (11th), not even by their precinct captain, even though the precinct with all the endangered homes delivered 345 of its 359 votes to Harold Washington in April`s election.
Another neighborhood stalwart is Johnnie Mae Tyler, a widow who lives above the soul-food restaurant she owns just south of Comiskey at 3528 S. Princeton Ave.
”We`re not being treated right,” Tyler said. ”If they`d just let us know what they`re gonna do. But they don`t even do that.”
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They know exactly what they`re going to do 75 blocks north of Tyler`s restaurant in the neighborhood that surrounds Wrigley Field. They are going to have meetings, lots of meetings.
In fact, the Washington administration is underwriting a formal series of round-table discussions with community leaders, of whom there are no shortage, to see whether there are any circumstances under which they would accept lights at Wrigley.
So far, the answer has been ”no.”
Perhaps that is as it should be, since night games–even just the 18 dates sought by the Cubs–would surely inconvenience some who live near the ballpark.
Yet what is impressive most about the Wrigleyville situation is not so much the merits of night baseball as the way a young, affluent, well-educated and predominantly white faction has been able to marshal political support for its cause.
Meetings about lights at Wrigley Field are typically heralded by printed agendas and press releases; emceed by a professional mediator hired by the city; attended by Ald. Bernard Hansen (44th), two state representatives, two state senators, the city`s commissioner of planning; covered by reporters from The Tribune, the Sun-Times, the Lake View Booster and Channels 2, 5, 7 and 9. The core group of anti-lights activists is called Citizens United for Baseball in the Sunshine, or CUBS. It has a 45-r.p.m. fundraiser record titled ”Dancing in the Summer Sun.” Its monthly newsletter carries a detachable form that reminds potential donors that CUBS accepts Visa or MasterCard. All contributions are, the newsletter reminds, fully tax-deductible.
All of this has proved enormously effective.
In 1982 and 1983, the anti-lights lobby pushed through state and city laws that effectively ban night play at Wrigley. Most indications are that those laws will remain in effect, even though the Cubs, which are owned by Tribune Co., publishers of The Tribune, have threatened to move elsewhere if not allowed to play at night.
Even the city`s elaborate round of meetings, the ones run by a professional mediator, seem to be going nowhere. In fact, the anti-lights activists have turned the tables on the city by demanding action to curb noise and traffic caused by day games.
”We`re not talking here about quid pro quos on night baseball,” said Rep. John Cullerton (D., Chicago) at the most recent session, a confab replete with free snacks and diet pop served by Cubs management in Wrigley Field`s Stadium Club.
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There is no free pop or talk of tax deductions 20 blocks west of the Loop, where some people want the Bears to build a new football stadium. Folks there have generally divided into two camps, for and against.
Those for a stadium argue that the neighborhood, having been ravaged by the race riots of 1968 and bypassed by investors ever since, needs the economic boost a stadium would represent.
Those against view the stadium as a plot by white downtown business interests to push poor blacks farther west to make way for Chicago`s ever-expanding central business district. At least that`s what they say.
No doubt the most ardent proponents of a West Side stadium–Rush-Presbyteri an-St. Luke`s Medical Center and William Wirtz, owner of the old Chicago Stadium at 1800 W. Madison St.–see it as a way to spruce up and secure their own back yards.
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More curious is what motivates the leaders of the opposition, the ministers affiliated with the Interfaith Organizing Project. It was this group that recently bused members to a protest outside the Winnetka home of Bears President Michael McCaskey.
Some group members have sounded hysterical in their opposition. Like Rev. Thomas O`Gorman, who last week told a radio audience that the stadium ”is
`Shoah` for black people” and the hospital`s ”final solution” for black people on the West Side.
This despite claims by hospital executives that they, too, will oppose the stadium unlesss all 330 families to be displaced are resettled in better housing nearby.
Another neighborhood faction, led by Nancy Jefferson`s Midwest Community Council, has withheld judgment on the plan while they explore ways the stadium could benefit West Siders.
But neighborhood power in Chicago is most often gained by dramatic action, not reaction.
Saul Alinsky knew that. As the late godfather of neighborhood organizers once wrote: ”Smash the plan. The smashing of the plan of the opposition is nowhere near as difficult as people think it is.”