The huge Spanish colonial arch at Kedzie that greets visitors driving west along 26th Street should provide a clue. This is not the stereotypical depressed, abandoned shopping strip many people associate with minority neighborhoods in Chicago. Instead, the 26th Street strip from Kedzie to Kostner, which forms the heart of the neighborhood known as Little Village, bustles with furniture, clothing, and small department stores, record shops, restaurants, and bars with large satellite dishes facing southwest to pick up boxing and soccer matches from Mexico. The storefront occupancy rate here would be the envy of almost any chamber of commerce in the city.
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Kreisler predicts Plaza de Mexico will be unique. “Because we want to do two things. First, we want to provide the usual supermarket-drugstore-department-store base of malls. But we also want to create a Mexican shopping mecca, something similar to Chinatown. We want to have, for example, a Mexican restaurant and Mexican foods store, plus shops selling leather goods, pottery, silver, and tin goods–items from Mexico not readily available now.” The plaza, according to Kreisler, also would contain office space that could house the Mexican consulate, a Mexican trade bureau, some city outreach office, and a cultural center. Kreisler says he is open to other suggestions from the community. “Several groups have talked about some sort of theater, or at least a place where plays can be performed.”
Local merchants, not surprisingly, have come out strongly against the proposed mall. “You can say that 98 percent of the 26th Street businessmen oppose the idea,” says Omar Lopez, a onetime 26th Ward aldermanic candidate who now heads an ad hoc group titled the Comite Pro-Defensa la Villita (Committee for the Defense of Little Village). “We feel this is economic invasion, not economic development. We feel there are more pressing problems that the alderman and businessmen can work on–housing, education, and health, for example. The healthiest segment of the Little Village community is the business segment. Why tamper with it? A large mall would force businesses here to close. Then you’d have empty stores down the line. If you don’t have a healthy business strip, the community begins to suffer.”
She defends not having taken a public stand against the mall. “They wanted me to say the chamber was against the mall. But I can’t do that without approval of the board of directors. I called the board, and they gave me a vote of confidence and asked me to make a study of the shopping-mall proposal.”
Garcia, whose recommendation on zoning changes for the area could make or break the project, so far has declined to give an official position. He says he is waiting for the results of studies by the city’s Department of Economic Development and Department of Planning, an impact study prepared by the University of Illinois at Chicago, and two community meetings.
For now, Garcia seems unperturbed by the opposition of the 26th Street businessmen, many of whom have opposed him unsuccessfully in five elections since 1984. “The businessmen on 26th Street have never exactly been on the cutting edge for me anyway,” he says. “They said basically that because I didn’t come out against the shopping center, they won’t support me. If they don’t want to support me, that’s their right.”
