“My company used to be in the Sun Belt,” said one north-side business owner who was overheard by North Business and Industrial Council executive director Carl Bufalini (NORBIC Network, February 1988). “The incentives we initially received were great. But it did not take long before there were schools and roads to be built. When a waste treatment plant had to be built they counted on us as a major source of funds. Before you knew it, it was costing us even more to operate than it did in Chicago. So we moved back.”
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The secret ingredient in the Wrigley Field lights controversy? According to Ron Dorfman in Chicago Times (March/April 1988), it’s homophobic Cubs fans. “Gay-baiting and -bashing are already a problem [in the neighborhood], and would be even without the ballpark. . . . To be blunt, the concern is that thousands of besotted young yahoos from the outer nabes and burbs will pour out of the ballpark at ten p.m. looking for action. What they will find, on any random summer night, is thousands of gay men and lesbians going to and from their homes and the scores of bars, restaurants, clubs, and theaters on the Halsted, Clark, Broadway, and Belmont strips.”
And, Lord, deliver us from the Chicago school of economics. “Can a nation afford this exclusive rule of competition, this purely economic economy?” asks Wendell Berry in a sermon delivered last fall (Harper’s, March 1988). “The great fault of this approach to things is that it is so drastically reductive. . . . Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”
Bad weather accomplishes what the school board can’t. “My 32 seventh graders really fill up a room,” Blaine School teacher Roberta Motanky tells Substance (February 1988). The class rows go all the way to the back wall leaving no room for group tables, only desks. Lack of physical space makes art and other enrichment activities nearly impossible. When so many kids were out on those cold days [in early January] the first thing we did was push desks around for better space. Then I had some kids in the back painting while I worked with others. Everyone got a turn. It was amazing!”
