Across the Northwest Tollway from Rosemont’s gleaming office towers, swank hotels, huge convention center and popular holiday lights display, another, more humble Rosemont subsists.
The 87 six-flat apartment buildings north of the Allstate Arena are home to many of the people who clean the offices and hotel rooms or bus tables at Rosemont’s upscale restaurants.
In the area known as The Courts on the northwest edge of town, the chatter among neighbors is more likely to focus on rats, roaches and the rent than on Rosemont’s prospects for landing a casino.
“I’m appalled at the filth in some of the buildings,” said Nancy Rock, a bilingual social worker for Des Plaines School District 62, which includes the largely Latino area. “A lot of these families are in survival mode. If they can put food on the table and clothes on the kids, that’s pretty much it.
“It’s a totally different area of Rosemont. It’s not the gated community.”
The part of Rosemont north of the tollway is 76 percent Hispanic, with 21 percent living in poverty and with a per capita income of less than $13,000 a year, according to the 2000 U.S. census.
The part of Rosemont separated from the rest of the village by a security checkpoint is 91 percent white and had a per capita income of almost $27,000 in 2000.
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As recently as two years ago, village officials called for tearing down 18 of the apartment buildings in The Courts and razing nearby light-industrial buildings. But the plan never advanced because the village lacked the money–at least $22 million–to carry it out, officials said.
“There was a lack of communication with the community, but that has been improved,” said Miguel Santiago, a former state representative who was hired in 1998 to be the liaison between Hispanic residents and Mayor Donald Stephens.
Rosemont officials now say they are refocusing their efforts on improving life for more than 1,500 residents of the three-story brick apartment buildings, built about 40 years ago for airline employees but now inhabited primarily by working-class Mexican immigrant families.
The biggest example of the village’s new push in the area is a $4 million recreation center that opened three weeks ago on Barry Street. Staffed by three full-time bilingual workers and housing a police substation, the converted tour-bus depot has drawn about 300 children a week who previously had no place to play.
Now they use the gym for soccer and basketball and a field next to the center for soccer and baseball. The center includes a classroom for English as a second language, citizenship, literacy and high school equivalency classes.
“We are going to make this a model community,” Santiago said.
But residents say life on the north side of the expressway is far from idyllic.
Virtually everyone in the neighborhood has a rat story to tell.
Victor Brenes said he had to sell his car because rats gnawed through cables under the vehicle. His landlord put out balls of rat poison, but Brenes is afraid that children such as his son might eat the poison by mistake.
Brenes, a construction worker, said he and his friends became so fed up with the rats last summer that they poured water into their holes, forcing the vermin out.
“We kicked them and beat them to death with rolled-up newspapers,” he said.
Ramon Caceres said he heard a strange groan as he started his car engine after a cold night earlier this year. Popping the car’s hood, he found chunks of what had been a rat that had nested near his radiator belt.
“My 8-year-old son says to me, `Mommy, wake me up so I can see the rats fighting,'” said Anita Shaltapour, a room service operator at a Rosemont hotel.
Shaltapour and her husband, Arcadio Gonzalez, pay $825 a month for a two-bedroom apartment where they live with their four children on Doris Court.
Gonzalez, who works as a cook in a retirement home, believes roach eggs are to blame for the red bumps on his forearm, abdomen and chest.
The family’s landlord, Vince D’Andrea of Norridge, said a village employee called him a month ago to report rats on his property.
In the last year Rosemont has increased garbage pickup in the area to twice a week and ordered landlords to hire rat exterminators and install traps.
“I did what the village told me to do, but I don’t see the other landlords doing it, so what good is it?” D’Andrea said. “The rats are a problem for the whole area. They don’t live in my building. They don’t pay rent.”
Most landlords in the neighborhood are absentee property owners. They say the area’s rat problem has been exaggerated.
Zbigniew Adamiec, who owns a building on Carol Court, said the village threatened to revoke occupancy permits unless landlords proved that they hired exterminators. He faxed officials proof that exterminators made visits to his building in April and August.
Herbert Mueller, who owns a building on Ann Court and lives in Park Ridge, said he bought bigger garbage cans because the ones being used frequently overflowed.
“I don’t see the big deal,” said Mueller, president of the Rosemont Apartment Owners Association.
Santiago, the liaison to the city, said residents who are afraid to complain to landlords often come to him with problems.
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Village officials have started a program in which more affluent residents adopt 10 families from the apartment buildings. The village also gave free turkeys and coupons to 50 poor families for Thanksgiving.
“There is a real commitment here,” Santiago said. “There is only one Rosemont, not two Rosemonts.”