“There is never a need for a woodcarver to buy wood and thus pay someone to kill trees,” writes David Stein in Things Green (Winter ’89), the newsletter of the Chicago Green Alliance on West Maxwell. “In the city you can find a great deal of discarded furniture in the alleys and dumpsters.” There are limitations, of course. “I carve a lot of spoons, and one reason for this is that the size and shape of most of the discarded wood I find lends itself to such a use. A chair arm, for example, cannot be made into Michelangelo’s Pieta, but it does have a good cooking spoon inside.”
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Good news if you’re married to an alderman’s brother. In a case decided last October, the city Board of Ethics answered an alderman’s question about whether he could hire his sister-in-law without violating the Chicago Ethics Ordinance. The answer was yes: “Section 26.2-1(s) states that ‘relatives’ are parents, children, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, grandparents and grandchildren, fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, stepfathers and stepmothers, stepsons and stepdaughters, stepbrothers and stepsisters, half-brothers and half-sisters. Accordingly, the Board informed the alderman that the Ethics Ordinance provisions regarding the employment of relatives did not place any restrictions upon the hiring of sisters-in-law” (Annual Report 1987-88, Board of Ethics). See, Chicago really is ready for reform.
Shopping mall to the world… “Chicago is probably the largest shopping center construction growth area in the United States today,” says David P. Bossy of the Mid-America Real Estate Corpor-ation in a recent release. MARC’s industry survey reveals a projected 17.6 million square feet of new or expanded shopping-center space in 1989-90 in the eight-county metropolitan Chicago area. In the previous five years, the total was 18.3 million.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
