People keep asking which side I’m on in the fight over where to build a new Chicago Children’s Museum.
My answer is neither side.
I have friends on both sides, and you can make a case for either position. The mostly underground museum would enliven a little-used corner of Grant Park. Then again, great urban parks should have a quiet corner or two for contemplation. And the precedent of building more on the city’s front lawn is, well, troubling.
Seems to me a compromise could be reached by “unbuilding” elsewhere so there would be no net increase in land coverage. The Petrillo Music Shell could go, as could the maintenance sheds at the park’s south end. Or deck over more of the Metra railroad culvert to create new parkland, as was done for Millennium Park.
Point is, it’s time to strike a compromise that will satisfy most — though never all — of the antagonists and, at long last, turn the bloody page!
The Grant Park showdown between Mayor Richard Daley and our various civic and newspaper editorial boards is the latest example of a very disturbing pattern — call it the Standoff Syndrome — that is slowly paralyzing our city, county, region and state.
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There’s the Cook County standoff between President Todd Stroger and reformers on the County Board backed by their moral supporters.
There’s the timeless regional standoff between Chicago and its more affluent suburbs — a less publicized impasse that surfaces, for instance, when the city backs a major railroad’s plan to loop more bothersome freight trains across suburbia rather than through the city.
There’s the Springfield standoff between Gov. Rod Blagojevich and House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago), a standoff that once again threatens to dead-end a sorely needed public works funding package.
And, of course, there’s the ongoing soap opera in Washington, lately between a lame-duck Republican president and a Democratic Congress.
Some claim gridlock is good because it keeps government from raising taxes and otherwise fouling the smooth workings of our free-enterprise system. Let us now repeat the libertarian bromide about governments governing best when they govern least.
Don’t get me wrong. Free enterprise is a swell thing. The economy is well-served, generally, when people pursue their individual interests. But without government setting rules to promote fair play, without government maintaining an infrastructure upon which private traffic can move, without government providing for those unable to provide for themselves, where does that leave us? Answer: back in the 19th Century. We tried it that way, remember? And for most Americans it didn’t work that well.
So let’s go ahead and keep digging in over the Children’s Museum. But keep in mind that Chicago has yet to gain traction on a number of its more serious problems. Too many kids are still killing one another. Too many are dropping out of school. Entire neighborhoods are quietly coming unglued as thousands of homes sink into foreclosure. Oh, how those subprime mortgage brokers must love gridlock.
So must our surrounding counties and states love the County Board standoff, as our higher property and sales taxes chase consumers, jobs and taxpayers to surrounding counties and states.
As for the trench warfare in Springfield, who cares that the state is technically broke and unable to pay its bills? Or that schools are underfunded and roads and bridges are badly neglected? Why worry when we’re having so much fun needling the governor with the threat of recall legislation?
Down along the Potomac River, meanwhile, the gridlock is broken only by a one-time consensus to issue stimulus checks using money we don’t have. The tougher calls — what to do about 47 million uninsured people, about millions of undocumented immigrants, about funding Social Security and Medicaid — will have to wait.
What we need, and need now, are leaders with the courage to compromise over the little things so we move on to the big things that actually make a difference.
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John McCarron writes, teaches and consults on urban affairs.