For 40 years, the squat, brick building on West Madison Street was nearly invisible.
It was built as a garage in the 1950s, then spruced up and made into an auto showroom. During the 1970s, a school for emotionally disturbed children moved in, and then a carpet-cleaning firm.
Now the building marks a defining point in the career of Chicago Board of Education President D. Sharon Grant.
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For Grant, the bunkerlike structure at 5151 W. Madison St. has become a kind of Waterloo, a place where her word is being tested against the evidence of public records.
Swirling around the building are questions about Grant’s judgment, squandered money, the knowledge of board officials and possible conflicts of interest.
For board members, it has been a nagging distraction from the business of educating 411,000 children.
Owned by the Board of Education, the building has been leased since 1984 to the Austin Developmental Center, a now-defunct company that was run by Grant’s mother.
Although the center fell chronically behind in its rent, sometimes owing as much as $49,000, board officials repeatedly extended its lease.
The center’s lease required it to pay for all building upkeep and improvements, but some $340,000 in school funds were poured into repairs during 1992 and 1993.
And in defiance of its lease, the center failed to pay more than $250,000 in county property taxes on the building from 1984 to 1992, county and board records show.
Now the faceless brown structure is the subject of almost daily news reports.
At heated meetings, board members have questioned whether Grant had a conflict of interest involving 5151 W. Madison St., and the board demanded that the company Grant’s mother ran pay the board $300,000.
They have asked the Cook County state’s attorney’s office to determine whether wrongdoing occurred and to find out whether the money spent on repairs should be reimbursed to the board.
“Don’t ask me questions about my mother’s personal business,” Grant said last week when questioned by a reporter. “Do you answer for your mother? I don’t answer for my mother.”
Grant’s mother, community activist Illa Daggett, has been in a coma since 1990, when she was beaten in a brutal attack.
Grant has steadfastly maintained that she had no dealings at all with the building on West Madison.
“I know nothing about it,” she said.
But the managers of the carpet store currently operating there tell a different story.
After Grant’s mother was attacked, “Sharon took over,” said Booker Brown, who runs Bromad Enterprises Inc., a floor-covering firm, along with former Chicago Park District chief Jesse Madison. Brown is also Bellwood’s village clerk.
Since August 1986, their company has operated under a sublease from the Austin Center, and they now pay $1,650 a month to use part of the building.
Brown and Madison said Grant has been their contact for building matters since 1990. Among their many dealings with Grant, they said, was a 1992 meeting with her and then-board real estate director Basma Abusharif, in the board’s downtown legal offices, to resolve a dispute over a water bill.
Abusharif refused to comment, but a board source confirmed that the meeting took place and that Grant was there.
The board’s real estate file also shows that Grant was sent certified letters and legal notices pertaining to the building starting in November 1990. She was listed as the building contact person on board rent tabulation sheets as recently as June 1993.
But Grant says: “I don’t know anything about all those letters.”
Some who know Grant say that her responses and attitude in the matter mirror her mother.
Indeed, the fracas over the building is in many ways a legacy of Grant’s mother, Illinois C. Daggett, a rough and tumble, two-fisted West Side activist.
Daggett was a slim, hard-eyed woman possessed of boundless energy and a biting, abrasive wit. At countless boycotts, board meetings and bused-in protests, she stood tall for the West Side.
Friends say she had only one thing to fear in life: her own fearlessness.
A native West Sider, Daggett’s political roots trace to the 27th Ward Regular Democratic Organization, but her resume includes civil rights marches to which she brought her children and grandchildren. She is often credited as one of the organizers of the 1982 ChicagoFest boycott.
She has held a string of city patronage jobs, worked on the political payroll of Ald. Ed Smith (28th), and was appointed to the Citizens Advisory Committee of then-State’s Atty. Richard M. Daley.
Daggett was a member of the nominating committee that chose her daughter, Grant, for a position on the school board in 1988.
For two decades, she made 5151 W. Madison St. the headquarters of an ever-expanding network of community organizations.
The land had been leased to Hendrickson Pontiac since 1947, but the car dealer closed its Madison Street showroom in 1970, a time of tumultuous racial change in the Austin neighborhood. Hendrickson moved to Villa Park and, in 1974, sublet the building to Daggett’s Austin Center.
The state-funded community mental health program Daggett first ran there was in many ways a harbinger of her career as an activist: It began amidst great hopes and a bitter legal battle. Daggett fired several of her mental health workers who tried to form a union, but the workers later won a judgment for back pay and penalties.
After taking over Hendrickson’s sublease, she persuaded state Mental Health Department officials to repair the building’s roof and heating system, the center’s then-treasurer Steve Blezien recalled.
Her activities soon expanded into housing and anti-crime efforts.
By the mid-1980s, Daggett controlled a dozen large South Austin apartments, most of which were donated to her organizations. But some of the buildings were chronically in Housing Court for violations ranging from rat infestation to abandonment, court records show.
The apartments racked up delinquent gas bills totaling more than $190,000 and unpaid water bills of more than $20,000, court records show. In several cases, judges fined Daggett, held her in contempt of court, or ordered her to vacate and demolish unsafe buildings.
By the late 1980s, Daggett’s fortunes seemed to be on the decline.
Her school for mentally handicapped children was shuttered and its programs were taken over by other firms. Her anti-crime program had withered.
In March of 1988, when the Austin Center was $27,560 in arrears on rental payments, the board declared her in default and terminated Daggett’s lease.
But Daggett remained in the building.
Through an attorney, she told the board that she was going to receive about $400,000 from the sale of three buildings that were slated for rehab under a $6 million state housing program.
In a signed agreement with the board, Daggett promised to use $27,500 of the sale proceeds to pay her delinquent rent. With the agreement in hand, the board renewed her lease in December of 1988.
At the time, Grant ran the board’s real estate committee.
A transcript of the December 1988 real estate committee shows Grant left the room while her mother’s lease renewal was discussed. When Grant returned, there was apparently further discussion of the lease in executive session, for which Grant was present. The transcript does not show what was said during that portion of the meeting.
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Grant was silent when the real estate committee decided to send Daggett’s lease proposal to the full board without recommendation.
The full board approved the extension.
That month, the three buildings were sold and state housing officials placed $412,226 into an escrow account to be used for land payments.
Legal records pertaining to the escrow account show that a portion of that money was used to pay off a variety of liens filed against the buildings, including some $25,000 still owed to mental health workers Daggett fired in the 1970s.
In the end, the Austin Center was paid $354,000 for the buildings, land records show.
But Daggett did not pay $27,500 to the board, school records indicate.
In February of 1990, the board renewed the center’s lease, contingent on “immediate” payment of the still-outstanding $27,500.
But again, the money was not forthcoming.
In June of 1990, Daggett’s life changed forever.
While working as a supervisor in a Cabrini-Green outpost of the city’s Department of Human Services, Daggett was beaten by the husband of an office worker she had upbraided for poor job performance.
Johnny Lee Morris, 23, knocked Daggett to the ground and jumped on her head, according to police reports. Morris pleaded guilty to attempted murder in 1991 and is serving a 22-year prison sentence.
Daggett suffered traumatic brain injuries from which she probably will not recover, said Dr. Vinod Sahgal, who treated her until last year. She is in a persistent vegetative state and has no cognitive functioning, Sahgal said.
Today, family members and nurses care for her around the clock. But family friends say they have faith that she will arise again and pick up her work where she left off.
While Brown and Madison’s carpet shop is up and running, the room where Daggett’s center was is barren and empty today.
Only it has been freshly drywalled and painted.
The work on the empty room was done by Board of Education tradespeople at a time when the city’s schools were crumbling and beset by emergency fire code violations and other life-safety hazards.
Some of that work was undertaken while Grant was on the board, but most of it occurred during a gap in her service.
Grant first served on the board from September 1988 to June 1989. During that stint, she headed the real estate committee, which oversees leases and repairs.
She left to form a health care company that specialized in mental health cases.
She rejoined the board in February 1993, and became president in May.
The board authorized a $183,000 repair of the building’s roof in April 1992.
An additional $159,000 worth of work was done later by school electricians, carpenters and cabinetmakers, board records show.
The second phase of repairs was not authorized by the board but was done at the direction of then-school facility director James Harney.
Grant loyalists on the board say Harney initiated the repairs on his own because the leaking roof was an emergency, and he was trying to protect a board asset.
But others question why Harney, who was constantly besieged by parents’ groups, aldermen and board members to make emergency repairs on the city’s decaying schools, ordered work on a rental building in which an existing tenant was responsible for upkeep.
Harney, who resigned last month, declined to comment.
Another question eludes even those closely linked with the now-defunct community center:
Rent money still comes in, but where does it come from?
The Austin Center was dissolved as a corporation in 1992, but the board fairly regularly receives monthly payments of $1,938 for rent and $687 in back-payments, board records show. The payments have been made with cashiers’ checks, board records show.
James Elam Sr., 58, former president of the center’s board of directors, said he’s not sure who’s footing the bill. But he isn’t.
“As far as I know, the Daggett family has been paying the rent on that building,” Elam said.
“As I understood it, Sharon was supposed to be opening the place back up,” he said.
He spoke with Grant’s father a few times recently, he said, and was told that “Sharon was fixing the place up.”
Elam said he never asked why or when.
When the school board last week voted unanimously to seek full reimbursement of the $300,000-plus repair bill, board attorneys said they would contact officers of the community center “immediately.”
Elam said he hasn’t received the call, but he’s not worrying about it.
“First of all, there’s nothing I’ve done wrong and there’s nothing they can get,” Elam said.
“They can put me in jail if they want to, but even that wouldn’t matter,” he added.
“I have no job.”