Second Ward alderman Bob Fioretti was driving through the South Loop, admiring the streetlight poles he’d just had painted, when he spotted a woman crouched over in the small park on the corner. She appeared to be collecting her dog’s poop in a plastic bag while the dog waited patiently at the end of its leash. Fioretti came to a stop. For the sake of the ward, he had to see what happened next.
It’s not easy conquering the forces of chaos in the Second Ward, an L-shaped collection of neighborhoods on the near south and near west sides. But Fioretti was convinced that it had to be done, and last year he ousted incumbent Daley ally Madeline Haithcock with the brazen promise that he, a prosperous white trial attorney with a perpetual tan and imperturbable hair, would do it better than she could—one postal box and pile of dog shit at a time.
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“Gross!” echoed Fioretti. “Yeah, we had them all painted. And now we’re starting to get to other—I mean, people shouldn’t have overhanging weeds, you know. We’ve just put these stop signs in here recently. We’ve had about 25, maybe 30 locations where we’ve put in stop signs where people were asking for them for years—and not just a few years. And see these signs, these tow-zone signs? We’re getting all these replaced. Hundreds of signs are being replaced throughout the ward, and you’ll see the difference it makes.”
Still, there were troubles all over the place. On South Calumet Fioretti launched into a home-by-home analysis: “We’ve got one drug house on this block. Right here. There are always people going in and going out…. Now you see we’ve replaced all these street signs here for the first time in probably 20 years….Now this is where Bobby Rush lives….We have a bunch of people registered at this address, and I’m still trying to figure out why. It’s a Park District property….Now this is Howard Brookins’s cousin who runs this church. He’s probably in there; we don’t need to go in there or we’ll be there for 25 minutes. He’s a good guy.”
Fioretti grinned, stopped the car, and rolled down his window. “Hey, what time’s the barbecue?” he asked.
“Oh, my wife’s beautiful.”
He headed back east into the West Haven neighborhood, block after block of new townhomes and row houses built on the former site of the CHA’s notorious Henry Horner Homes. On one corner the fire hydrant was missing a brass ring, and fast-food wrappers had been jammed into it. Fioretti stopped the car. “Oh, look at that one, Sam!” he cried out. “Look at all that trash they’ve stuffed inside. And I wonder if they’ve put drugs in there too. See, they hide their drugs in there for the sales.”
