I wasn’t going to write about the New Yorker‘s March 8 profile of Mayor Daley. As a general rule, I don’t like to critique other journalists—it’s hard enough to make a living in this racket, and the last thing any of us needs is somebody nipping at his heels.
And I’m certainly not one of those Chicagoans who thinks only the locals can capture the city’s essence. I thought Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker‘s political writer, did a good job with his July 2008 piece on Barack Obama’s connections to the Daley machine. A.J. Liebling’s New Yorker articles on what he dubbed the Second City and David Halberstam’s classic Harper’s profile of the first Mayor Daley remain relevant to this day.
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Let’s start with the central premise that Chicago would be some giant slum if not for Daley. I know this is a standard spin on things—you hear it quite a bit from corporate types and other Daley defenders around here—but it irritates me because it’s a cheap shot at Daley’s mayoral predecessors, including my personal favorite, Harold Washington. Say what you will about Jane Byrne, Washington, and Eugene Sawyer, but they ruled during the economic dislocation of the 1980s. They didn’t have the good fortune to run the city during the go-go real estate market of the 1990s and early 2000s—a nationwide boom that boosted more cities than Chicago.
But then in 1989 Richie took charge, and “in the years that followed, Detroit, Cleveland, and other former industrial powers continued to wither, but Chicago did not. It has grown in population, income, and diversity; it has added more jobs since 1993 than Los Angeles and Boston combined. Downtown luxury condos and lofts have replaced old warehouses and office blocks. New trees and flower beds line the sidewalks and sprout from the roofs of high-rises. (Chicago has significantly more green roofs than any other city in America.) Diners and pizza joints have given way to daring restaurants like Alinea and L2O, where the chefs Grant Achatz and Laurent Gras are among America’s highest priests of the chemically complex food known as molecular gastronomy. Chicago is a post-industrial capital of innovation from house music to fashion—the Milan of the Midwest, as the Washington Post put it last year.”
Had house music emerged when Daley was in charge, I have no doubt he’d have done everything in his power to shut it down. For several years now he and his underlings in the City Council have been trying to force small concert promoters to get expensive licenses and insurance policies that could put scores of neighborhood arts institutions out of business; only pushback from big corporate promoters has put the plan on hold. Meanwhile, under Daley the public schools have all but given up on the arts: according to an October article in Catalyst, schools with more than 750 students are assigned either an art or a music teacher—and smaller schools only get one, part time.
So what? There’s a long-standing dispute about how accurately the district reports its dropout rates, but by most accounts it still loses half its high school students before they graduate. The system’s still in financial disarray (about $1 billion in the hole) and the test scores at dozens of schools are still well below the national average—despite the fact that the tests have gotten easier in the last few years and teachers are required to waste everyone’s time teaching kids how to take them.
Mussolini’s defenders used to say that at least he made the trains run on time. But Mayor Daley . . . oh, don’t even get me started on public transportation.
