One day last spring a work crew started digging up the street outside of Sharon Evans’s business. She owns and operates the building that houses the Live Bait Theater and Nightcrawler Cafe at 3914 N. Clark. “It was a Wednesday,” says Evans. “I figured, great, they’ll be done and gone before our weekend rush.”
By all accounts the project got off to a decent start, when work crews zipped up Clark from Barry to Addison, finishing that segment in only five or six weeks. “Part of our urgency was to get Addison completed by the start of the Cubs season,” says Tim Martin, an engineer with the city’s Department of Transportation who is overseeing the project. “But we also had an advantage in that first stage because the project was relatively straightforward. We were really only repaving the street.”
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In the meantime, Abramson says, Clark Street remained a mess. Not only had it been reduced to one-way traffic, it was cluttered with trucks and heavy equipment. Abramson says business at his store has dropped at least 75 percent since the project began. “We expanded our space from 250 square feet to 900 square feet this year,” he says. “We wouldn’t have done it if we knew this project was coming.”
“Peoples Gas told us they were going to be replacing some gas mains and then they changed their minds,” says Martin. “They kept changing their minds every time a different manager or supervisor within the company looked at the plans. We would dig a hole in preparation for their crews and then their crews would never come. So we had to fill the hole. And we end up looking pretty silly.
“The Peoples Gas Company has now revised its scope of work on Clark Street from Barry Avenue to Foster Avenue for at least the third time,” the letter says. “These changes in scope are now presenting serious staging difficulties to the City’s contractor. . . . As you should realize Clark Street is a major commercial area for the City and to minimize disruption to businesses is of utmost importance. Commitments made by the City and Contractor to the Community are being negated by the conflicts with the Gas Company.
Some merchants speculate that the delays were Mayor Daley’s way of getting even with Shiller, one of the few independents left in the City Council. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were doing this to rattle her cage,” says Evans. But Shiller dismisses this theory. “This doesn’t have anything to do with politics,” says Shiller. “I get along with Martin.”
