Loop Flood dampens world’s view of Chicago

J.J. Madia in 2017

 
     Chicago is a city marked by disaster. Maybe even defined by it. Not only did the modern metropolis arise out of the ashes of the 1871 fire, but it then assembled a chain of terrible tragedies, such as the Iroquois Theatre fire in 1903 and the Eastland capsizing in 1915, the former the most lethal building fire in U.S. history (unless you consider 9/11 just a building fire, and I don’t), the latter among the deadliest maritime disasters ever.
     There’s more. The Our Lady of the Angels School Fire. The first major aviation disaster in U.S. history was in Chicago, the Wingfoot Express, a hydrogen-filled Goodyear blimp that exploded over the Loop in 1919, crashing through the skylight of a bank building, killing 13 people.
     Chicagoans tend to overlook them. To me, the 1992 Loop Flood, which occurred 30 years ago today, barely counts among the disasters mentioned above. A flood where not only nobody got hurt, but most people never saw floodwaters. How big of a deal could it be? 

     Yet it is of global interest. Four years back, a British film crew from Discovery Channel UK came to town to shoot a Loop Flood episode for the first season of their very Britishly titled program, “Massive Engineering Mistakes.” The producers had read my 25th-anniversary story online. Would I mind talking to their cameras about the flood? Maybe down in the very freight tunnels under downtown? Well ....
     On one hand, hours would be spent to benefit someone other than myself. Who’d ever know I was on British TV? Yet there is a siren allure to being on TV anywhere. Appearing on TV means something. It is significant, and British TV, double significant. They’re all so refined, the Brits.
     True, I’d have to be at City Hall at 8:30 a.m. But heck, why not? Change of pace.
     So I’m there, waiting by the bronze “CITY HALL” sign, bright-eyed, expectant. I get a text from the producer. Traffic. Running late. That happens! No worries! I slide over to Petra’s for a cup of coffee.

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Rare bird.

     Warm weather drew my wife and me to the Chicago Botanic Garden both Saturday and Sunday, and we were rewarded with an abundance of new flowers—irises, daffodils, dogwood and forsythia—and unexpected wildlife: two otters (or, just possibly, the same otter seen twice), a flitting flock of some kind of tiny blue starling and the capstone, the white, sinuous bird above. My first hunch was that it was a snowy egret, but given the season and the location, it might just be an immature blue heron, or a great egret, which would be less off the beaten track than its snowy brethren, rare north of the Missouri River. Whatever it was, I'd never seen anything like it at the Botanic Garden before.
     We lingered, hoping for a better look, until an angry goose hurried over and drove us off. I don't want to anthropomorphize anything, but it truly seemed like the goose was protecting the egret, or whatever it was.
     "The birds are uniting," I told my wife, as we fled. "Humanity is doomed."
     I spent a while with my bird books Monday, trying to ID the mystery white bird, then decided it was a futile pursuit. Why care about exact scientific classification of a glimpsed bird anyway? Why limit the range of speculation to that realm? Maybe it was not a snowy nor great egret, and not an immature blue heron, but the spirit of springtime in avian form. A lost soul, allowed to escape the underworld for one hour a year, appearing on earth as a white sylph. There are possibilities outside of the The Sibley.
     Okay, those really aren't possibilities. But fun to think about nonetheless.

Are Columbus statues a free speech issue?

     The First Amendment saved America. So far, anyway. In a totalitarian state like Russia, free speech is first to vanish in any crisis. When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, he immediately shut down independent media and banned the word “war.”
     That couldn’t happen in America. Yet.
     Free speech is studied and supported by legal scholars, now and in the past. Scholars like Harry Kalven Jr., a beloved University of Chicago Law professor who in a book published in 1965 called “The Negro and the First Amendment” offered up a very useful concept: the heckler’s veto. The heckler’s veto is when, Kalven explained, authorities interfere with free speech to protect the speaker, supposedly, in the face of public hostility.
     A textbook example of the heckler’s veto occurred in Chicago the year the book was published. Comedian Dick Gregory led a protest against the inferior education Black children were given at Chicago Public Schools.
     They marched to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s home in Bridgeport and were met by a howling mob, hurling eggs and rocks. The police asked the demonstrators to leave and, when they didn’t, arrested them, explaining that the mob was too big to arrest. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld their actions.
     The case went to the Supreme Court, where in Gregory v. City of Chicago, Justice Hugo Black evoked the heckler’s veto in ruling for Gregory. Our constitutional rights cannot be shouted down.

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Lee Flaherty, promoter of Chicago Marathon, Rolls Royce, himself, dead at 90

Lee Flaherty

     Runners had a seedy reputation in the mid-1970s. At least among old guard gatekeepers like Chicago Park District Supt. Ed Kelly, who wasn’t about to permit thousands of joggers to stampede through his parks.
     “He apparently clung to the earlier view of runners as undesirables, a near-criminal element,” Andrew Suozzo writes in his history “The Chicago Marathon.”
     So those passionate about creating a marathon in Chicago turned to Lee Flaherty, whose Flair Communications did marketing work for the city.
     “Flaherty was politically connected and was able to get Mayor Daley interested in the marathon,” Suozzo writes.
     Then, Daley died, and Daley’s successor Michael Bilandic, himself a runner, was even more interested. He green-lighted the marathon, first held in 1977.
     Flaherty, who championed the Chicago Marathon in its early years, even paying for it himself for the first two years, until it found a corporate sponsor, died March 23, a month after being diagnosed with cancer, at his home in Flair Tower, the building he helped develop on Erie Street. He was 90.
     He was a pioneer in redeveloping River North, opening Flair Communications on Erie Street in 1964 when the area was downtrodden.
     He also helped create, in 1984, the World’s Largest Block Party, an outdoor festival that encouraged young people to linger downtown after work in an era when you could shoot a cannon down State Street at 6 p.m. and not hit anybody. The street party also provided a lifeline to Old St. Patrick’s Catholic Church at a time parish membership had dwindled.
     “When I came in 1983, Lee was a fixture at St. Pat’s,” the Rev. Jack Wall said. “When I became pastor and we started the block party, Lee really put his arms around it and helped us.”
     Flaherty claimed the block party was his idea, just as he insisted he was the founder of the Chicago Marathon, though hosting the 26.2-mile race wasn’t a particularly innovative idea: Detroit, Duluth, Minn., and San Francisco all started marathons the same year as Chicago.

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Wilmette Notes: Something’s in the air. A malevolent stealth variant for one.

     So I went to an art show opening in Pilsen Thursday night. Nobody asked for proof of vaccination. Only a few people wore masks. I wasn't one of them, because that's where I am right now. Leaving the party, I walked to my car down 16th Street under this viaduct and didn't feel scared at all. I mention that, well, as a counterbalance to Caren Jeskey's Saturday report. I don't have to wonder where my sense of alarm went: it seems to have somehow migrated to her. 

By Caren Jeskey

     “Are times stranger than usual?” pondered a client this week. 

    “Yes. They are. Period. Yes,” was my not very therapist-like retort. There is no way to sugarcoat the suffocating nature of too many hardships at once. Armageddon theorists have it all wrong. It’s not a god we have to fear. It’s terrifying humans, savage viruses, and atmospheric catastrophes. They are tangible and are here, all at once.     

     Last Saturday I ventured out (masked, of course) for a trim and a bit of a hang in my old stomping grounds, Lincoln Square. Shoppers with bags from Gene’s Sausage Shop carrying paper coffee cups and holding loved ones’ hands sure made it seem that the world is normal, and fun. And safe.
     Then a flash of a suffering person in Ukraine flickers across my mind’s eye and it looks surreal, this Norman Rockwellesque scene. I recall the story of the meter man who beat someone up in front of Gearheard across from the Square last week. I heard the voice of a man tell me that his mission in life is to get Evil Joe out of office. There's just no escaping the layers of stress and violence that are rippling through the world, all because of a misguided sense that there is an us and a them.
     As if war rife with crimes against humanity (and misinformed crazies* denying it), which is the worst thing one would ever have to live through, isn't bad enough, BA.2 is here (and misinformed crazies* are denying it). Folks are still dying, young people I know are still getting very sick with the virus, long term COVID is real, and this isn’t over ’til it’s over and it may never be over. In the past three weeks, nine folks I know (either directly or with one degree of separation) have been diagnosed with the pesky newest strain.* I stopped using the word crazy many years ago, but in this case I believe it sums things up. A bunch of reactive, impulsive, goofs with poor attention spans and the inability to have a conversation without shouting at or mocking you is one scary thing. And they stigmatize mental illness? Ha.
     After spending the day post-haircut at a sandwich shop (that I feel compelled to say requires proof of vaccination, and I was seated a good distance away from other patrons), I decided to be even braver. It seems time to step out a bit in an effort to balance good COVID sense with some degree of living, and finding inspiration and comfort in community and culture. A friend had called to say she wanted to get together — maybe I could drive to her place downtown? My first instinct was to say no 1) because I am scared of the city with crime double what it was back in Austin, Texas, and worse than it's been in years in Chicago, and I don't want my dear little Honda to get 'jacked and 2) I had not until that point been into anyone’s home other than my parents' for about six months or more. Plus she had a recent case of COVID in the household.
     I have come to realize that even though my extreme hermit lifestyle isn’t so bad and solitude can be golden, it has its down side — there’s only so much talking to plants, singing and dancing alone in one’s living room, and laughing aloud to podcasts and Netflix shows in an empty room that is reasonable for me — so I agreed to see her. Not at her house, but at a (vax required) show at Old Town School of Folk Music.
     David Bromberg Quintet was playing, and we scored a small table in the 2nd row that had been released that day for an otherwise sold-out show. As we settled in (N95 secured) Jordan Tice, a tall young man in faded jeans with a mop of black curls and clear brown eyes stepped on stage. He regaled us with tales sung and expertly strummed in a jaunty, yet philosophical lilt.
     “Mama said relax boy. Lighten up your load. Don’t bring too much down life’s long hard road. Just do what you can. Move a little more down the line. You’re gonna make it where you’re going in a matter of time.”
     When Bromberg stepped on stage his mega-fans whooped and hollered, then quickly settled down when he stepped to the mic, a captain at the helm of his lifeboat. My friend and I enjoyed this expert showman's set. I feel lucky that I have access to such high quality places and people in the entertainment field.
     I won’t tell the story of how Bromberg lost his shit when a man in the front row requested a song, because I don’t have to tell you that it’s hard to keep it together these days.

‘Nothing without integrity’

Sam Mendenhall

    “Exclusive video,” Fox 32 News promised a few days ago, “shows ex-’Empire’ actor’s first moments in Cook County Jail.”
     Sigh.
     I don’t blame the media. Have you ever driven past a car wreck and not taken a look? Nor do I blame the audience. There is something compelling about the Jussie Smollett case, an echoing mystery: How could this rich, handsome, apparently smart young man so methodically destroy his career?
     Even now, with the actor convicted of staging a hate crime hoax out on bond and all of us waiting, maybe for a year, to see whether he has to spend a few richly-deserved months in jail. Attention must be paid.
     Okay then, let’s pay attention.
     But is there a law that says everything about the Jussie Smollett case has to be about Jussie Smollett?
     Why not meet Sam Mendenhall instead?
     Haven’t heard the name? Dan Webb, the special prosecutor assigned to the case after Kim Foxx made an absolute hash of it, wanted the jury to measure Smollett’s character, or lack of same, against a man like Mendenhall, a partner at Winston & Strawn.
     “That is absolutely correct,” said Webb, executive co-chair at Winston. “The juxtaposition between Jussie Smollett and everything he did, compared to down-to-earth Sam Mendenhall, telling it like it is, talking about the evidence. He is a great lawyer.”

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Flashback 2009: Don’t be frightened, it’s just a book

     Republicans across the country, in their junkie scramble to find somebody to consider themselves better than, are assailing books that treat transgender children with dignity. They have some kind of argument, but the bottom line is they identify subgroups they feel safe to attack, and then do so. Plus it's key for them to deprive their children of any kind of broadening literature or experience to help guarantee they grow up to be fearful lunkheads like themselves.
     We're safe from that kind of crap in Chicago, generally, though nine years ago the the Chicago School Board did briefly suppress Marjane Satrapi's well-respected graphic novel Persepolis, until hoots of derision caused them to reverse course and pretend it never happened. But not before I wrote this column: 

     Can children be hurt by books?
     I’m not talking about the lifelong lower back problems, herniated discs and such, that no doubt will come from dragging around those text-crammed 35-pound backpacks. Sometimes I go to relocate a backpack belonging to one of our boys from the center of the living room floor, and it’s like trying to pick up a fire hydrant.
     I mean in the sense — always unspoken, always just assumed to be true — behind every book-banning controversy, such as the still-smoldering brush fire set off when the Chicago Public Schools booted Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” off its seventh-grade curriculum.
     Could reading a certain book hurt a child?
     “Research does not show any kind of direct connection between what is in a book and any kind of harm to a child,” said Barbara Jones, executive director of the Freedom To Read Foundation of the American Library Association. “There really is none.”
     A child encountering a supposedly “inappropriate” book will, she said, more likely just read over the alleged offensive parts.
     “The research shows when a child doesn’t understand a particular part of a book, they’re likely to skip over it,” Jones said.
     Given that Chicago is a city crawling with academics examining precisely how children learn, I figured it would be easy to find experts on this. It was. I turned to the Erikson Institute, probably the nation’s top graduate school teaching childhood development.
     “The important thing about a book is that it invites lots of discussion and debate,” said Professor Gillian McNamee, director of teacher education at Erikson.
     Can’t some difficult books jar sensitive kids?
     “Life experiences just don’t come at us that way,” McNamee said. “If we go see a movie, encounter a book, no one thing in life damages us. We might wish we hadn’t seen it or hadn’t read it. I remember reading “The Jungle” and just being furious and upset by it. Did it hurt me? Yes. But that was the power of the experience.”
     Of course, keeping children from powerful experiences, from the pain of discovering stark truths, is the principle behind these controversies. It’s the hangover from the Victorian era — childhood as a secret garden of fairies and flowers where scary real life must never intrude. Who still holds that view?
     “I’ve come to believe people mean well, they want to make a difference in world,” said Jones. “In the case of ‘Persepolis,’ torture is on the minds of all Americans. People want it to go away, and they think that by taking the book away, it’s an easy way to solve the problem. Only it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t solve the problem.”
     McNamee wondered if the people who decided to remove “Persepolis” from the seventh-grade curriculum even understand what the kids have been studying up to that point.
     “They’ve studied slavery in America by then,” she said. “They’ve encountered and chewed on some unhappy circumstances, both in their lives and in history. We’ve obviously heard about war. Hard times and brutal experiences are not unknown to them.”
     The ironic thing is, stark moments in literature, rather than somehow scarring children, instead help them overcome the actual troubles in their real lives.
     “Understand the power of fairy tales,” McNamee said. “You have these wrenching situations — ‘The Three Little Pigs,’ the Number One favorite story of generations. That’s a pretty bleak story. The mother sends her pigs away — two of the three get eaten. That’s exactly how we feel every day — two out of three times we get chewed up. But we rebound and learn to build an inner house that has some stability. We learn we can protect ourselves from the wolves. When you get these juicy stories, we open up and get distance from our own experience so we can start processing it. We ought not to be saying that book is going to jar somebody, when the whole point of literature is to wake us up and give us some space for a conversation.”
     She noted the CPS comment that teachers may not be ready to deal with the book.
     “That’s their job,” she said. “Our schools are filled with children who are vulnerable but might feel healed and stronger and wiser because we had a great discussion about a powerful book. Instead, they’re worried that this might upset somebody.”
     Teachers should be worried, not about kids possibly being shocked by a sentence or a drawing, but about them instead being bored by pabulum guaranteed not to offend.
     “The biggest threat is students who are not engaged,” McNamee said. “Not talking about what they’re hearing, reading, seeing. Ironically, what state standards now want is students who are able to get inside a book and wrestle and argue and debate about it, using text-based evidence. If young people are reading bland literature and things that aren’t engaging them, that’s really a problem.”
          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 20, 2013