Paul Radoy had a few things he wanted to say to Mayor Daley, and on a hot evening last August he got his chance.
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“I’m not expecting the city to come and pick up the trash that blows around the streets here—that’s something we have to take care of,” he told me later. “But I am expecting the city to keep the roads from crumbling, to keep the curbs from crumbling. I don’t think that’s too much for taxpayers to expect.”
It’s not unusual for the mayor to appear impassive, even disinterested, as he listens to his constituents gripe at these hearings—and sometimes it’s hard to blame him. But Radoy was taken aback by what Daley did as he began to speak.
After he was done speaking, Radoy, like the others who’d testified, was surrounded by city officials wielding legal pads. They escorted him to the hallway, dutifully wrote down his complaints, and handed him their business cards, promising to look into the issues he’d brought up. It was impressive, but that’s the point of these hearings: the mayor is out to show that while things may not be perfect for everybody, there are government officials who care.
We walked a few yards from his front door to a short stretch of 18th Street that dead-ends at an alley just east of Lawndale Avenue. Not long after the budget meeting, Radoy says, city workers showed up and filled the block’s many potholes with cold patch—which washed away within a few weeks. He followed up by repeatedly calling 311, the city’s help line, as well as the office of 24th Ward alderman Sharon Dixon. Two more times crews came out to spread more cold patch—and both times it washed away again. By the time I arrived, the pavement looked like the surface of the moon, broken every few feet by craters.
“I’ve got nothing against Lincoln Park, but it kind of feels like if I lived in a more affluent area, you wouldn’t see this,” he said, standing on the lip of the sinkhole.
