Is there a newsstand vendor who does not occasionally dream about making news instead of selling it? Rick Graff is getting his chance. Graff and fellow proprietors Rocky and Tasha–two Alsatians with a knack for public relations–run Rick’s News on Randolph just west of Michigan, outside the Cultural Center. In December Graff was threatened with eviction by city authorities, who want him off his accustomed spot on the sidewalk by mid-January. This is Chicago, not Calcutta, City Hall has said in effect, and we don’t want downtown streets in the Second City looking like a third-world bazaar.
Graff’s violence has been merely rhetorical. He is talking to reporters and passing out petitions supporting his continued operation at the site, which customers and sympathetic passersby are eagerly signing. To romantics, the newsstand remains one of the essential big-city institutions, and its demise in a world of cable news and convenience stores has brought the usual laments. Rick’s matters not only because it is one of the best but because it is one of the last of its kind. Stumbling upon such dispatches as Der Kicker, the Economist, and the Harvard Business Review at Rick’s provides a heady whiff of faraway places.
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A sidewalk newsstand is not a boutique. In some neighborhoods, newsies subsist by selling as few as 200 papers a day, which nets them, according to published figures, maybe $14. That doesn’t leave a lot in the budget for capital improvements. Besides, in most neighborhoods a fresh coat of paint is regarded as a dare by graffitists. The city has had strict regulations for years governing the size and sites of such structures, but like most city regulations they were passed less to enhance the look of the city than the cash flow of aldermen and inspectors willing to be bribed into not enforcing them.
On the sidewalk scale, the Cultural Center offers only a dingy stone facade punctuated by recessed double windows; even the Randolph Street entrance, considered the lesser of the building’s two main doorways, is scaled too grandly to be taken in except in parts. The portico, like the larger elements of the facade, needs to be looked at from a distance of yards to be even seen, much less appreciated from the perspective intended by the architects. And at that distance, Rick’s is diminished to insignificance.
Protecting and enhancing Loop street life has been the official ambition of the last two City Hall planning regimes. For example, city regulations now require that parking garages have retail space at street level in order to eliminate the sort of deadening blank spot on the sidewalk that Rick’s eviction would create on Randolph.
The city’s determined attempt to prod Graff into signing a pedway lease suggests that it isn’t so much Rick’s appearance that offends but the money Graff is making on city property. The case against Graff’s free use of public property seems clear-cut as a matter of principle, but precedent rather favors him. So should policy.
