I know it’s wrong to gloat, but residents of Hyde Park showed the University of Chicago a thing or two by voting the 39th precinct of the Fifth Ward dry in an Election Day referendum.
In 2006 the university bought the hospital and announced it would lease it to White Lodging of Merrillville, Indiana, whose chairman, Bruce White, is a member of the University of Chicago Medical Center Board of Trustees. In 2007, White Lodging unveiled a plan to demolish the hospital and put up a 17-story, 380-room building divided into two hotels.
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Residents in the area rebelled for several reasons: They didn’t want the old limestone and brick hospital demolished, they thought the new design was ugly, and they were turned off by White Lodging’s labor policies. None of the company’s 160 or so hotels are unionized.
Here’s where things got interesting. The Hyde Parkers had allied themselves with UNITE HERE Local 1, the hotel workers’ union, which had already been trying to force White Lodging to unionize its other hotels. This proved to be their ace in the hole. The officials at Local 1 did what any relatively well-connected bunch in Chicago would do: they called 14th Ward alderman Edward Burke, who advised them to call “my friend Mike Kasper,” says Lane.
Their strategy was clear: keep the issue bound up in red tape until after the election. But Cook County judge Edward O’Brien ruled against bringing in the handwriting experts. The university dropped its suit and took the fight to the streets.
Of course, the university could keep the fight alive by trying to repeal the prohibition with another referendum in the 2012 election. That means retracing the process, gathering signatures from voters to put the matter on the ballot, and hiring a good lawyer. Maybe they should call Ed Burke and see if he’s got anybody to recommend.
