Which toppings? Domino’s Pizza magnate Tom Monaghan “is wonderfully Philistine,” reports James Krohe Jr. in Chicago Times (March/April 1990). “‘The concept of delivering a hot, tasty pizza in 30 minutes or less,’ he has said, ‘is pure and needs no embellishment, any more than a Frank Lloyd Wright design might need a Gothic tower grafted onto it.’ He works in a $2.5 million private office, and when the learned and the powerful gather at his table from around the world, he feeds them pizza.”
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“Chicago annually spends less than two dollars per capita on [library] books and materials, far less than other major U.S. cities. Cleveland, Atlanta, Denver, St. Louis, and Baltimore spend more than twice that amount,” writes Bill Wyman in Chicago (March 1990). No wonder that “librarians and administrators say that the Chicago Public Library has been getting worse for the past 20 years…. For the most part, people seem to have forgotten what a library ought to do for them, and simply stay away.” At 4 PM on a typical weekday, Wyman found “vast sections” of the library’s temporary quarters (400 N. Franklin) “nearly deserted. On the government documents floor, a single patron sits. On the periodicals floor–the periodicals floor of one of the largest libraries in the world–perhaps a dozen readers sit quietly. Even downtown’s homeless don’t bother with this library.”
“Gentrification fuels the process of urban slums by lumping all people of a certain economic status into the same geographic area,” according to the Chicago Rehab Network, one of whose programs is the Neighborhood Lending Program, under which First National Bank of Chicago, Harris Bank, and the Northern Trust have agreed to lend $200 million for the rehabilitation of inner-city properties between 1989 and 1994. “We believe that NLP funds must be targeted to ensure the availability of affordable housing in all communities.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
