If you were to ask people what’s the most interesting thing happening on the near west side, chances are most of them would say “Da Bulls.” The reigning champs are sitting pretty atop the NBA and scalpers are hawking tickets for two to three times their cost. In recent weeks, extra police details have been assigned to traffic duty around the Chicago Stadium, as legions of rowdy fans have turned the area around Ashland and Madison into a free-for-all.
Most of the initial interest in the new stadium centered around the fact that it was to be privately financed, unlike most similar projects of recent years–the new White Sox park, for example, or the McCormick Place additions. The state is kicking in about $20 million for infrastructure improvements; the other $170 million or so is being underwritten by an international loan syndication. The Chicago Sun-Times ran a front-page story a month ago announcing that Wirtz and company had secured all the necessary financing. Reporter Fran Spielman also noted that the deal had been held up for several years by “haggling” with the several dozen residents who would be displaced by the stadium and the huge parking lots that would accompany it.
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Wirtz and Reinsdorf, on the other hand, not only agreed to provide new homes for the displaced residents but made a series of other concessions to them as well: the costs of their move were underwritten by the Joint Venture, and they’re receiving $2,000 bonus checks on top of that (home owners choosing to “cash out,” on the other hand, will receive fair market value plus $30,000); also, a special fund was established to subsidize any increase in property taxes residents of the new two-flats might have to pay. “We didn’t want to leave our house, but at least we’re being treated with some respect,” remarks one of the resettled home owners, Rachel Moore, who has lived in her two-flat on the 1900 block of Monroe since 1946. “If it wasn’t for IOP, our community wouldn’t have gotten anything.”
The city is also party to the agreement. A new park adjacent to Cregier High School, located near Jackson and Western, is in the planning stages. “Our understanding is that the Park District has committed the funds, and is in the process of surveying the land,” says Pat Dowell Cerasoli, the city’s deputy commissioner of planning and development. Another proviso in the agreement–one Cerasoli says is still being “ironed out”–calls for a new public library branch, something the community group has been lobbying for since its incorporation in 1985. At present, the community’s closest library is the new Harold Washington Library Center at State and Van Buren. “That’s two or three miles away,” points out Gates.
IOP is already getting input from architects and builders on the 75 new houses that will go up in the area between Damen and Western and between Lake and the Eisenhower; the group is calling this new model community the “Better Alternative Area.” The area has seen patches of redevelopment in the past several years; Gates has spent the last six years buying several abandoned and dilapidated buildings on his block at Leavitt and Van Buren, the same block where he was born 40 years ago. He’s not a speculator–he has rehabbed the buildings and rented units for reasonable rates to several families. “I wanted to bring the block back to how I remembered it as a child growing up in the 50s and 60s,” he says. Gates’s lead has prompted several neighbors to do likewise, and now a number of homes within a four- to six-block radius are sporting new coats of paint, better landscaping, or more extensive renovations. But the only housing that’s been built within the borders of IOP’s Better Alternative Area in the past 16 years–besides the brand-new two-flats–are several private housing developments that went up near Damen and Jackson between 1977 and 1980.
“It was a land grab, pure and simple,” says Reverend Arthur Griffin, who has been pastor of the First Baptist Congregational Church at Ashland and Washington since 1957. “There was no discussion, no hearings, nothing.” The only reason the community learned of it, Griffin says, is that the cousin of one of the members of his congregation worked in Springfield.
McCaskey had been whining in public since early 1985 that his team needed a new stadium–Soldier Field’s infrastructure was poor, and 70 percent of its seats were in the end zone. Was McCaskey behind the Rush-UIC plan? “We certainly think so,” says Earnest Gates. In any case, after Cullerton’s bill was killed in the fall of 1986, the whining turned to ultimatum: McCaskey threatened to leave the city unless he got a new stadium. (McCaskey was phoned several times for this article, but he failed to return calls.)
