Earlier this week, in a story by veteran political reporter Lynn Sweet, the Chicago Sun-Times
reported that developer Dan McCaffery
has proposed placing the Obama
Presidential Library on the site of the old U.S. Steel South Works along the shores of Lake Michigan
on Chicago
Whether the plan to place the Obama Library on the South
Works site, or anywhere in our financially strained city, makes sense is grist
for another mill. More interesting to
yours truly were the juxtaposed pictures of the old South Works site and the
new Obama Library the Sun-Times ran
with the story. The old South Works are
portrayed as belching out fumes, dumping detritus into the lake, and just being
an environmentally obtuse corporate citizen in a number of ways. The Obama Library, on the other hand, is, in
the artist’s renderings featured by the Sun-Times,
is a glowing architectural marvel, adding even further to our lake front’s
breathtaking beauty.
The impression the Sun-Times,
and other proponents of the South Works site
for the Library, wish to convey is obvious:
the Obama Library is very,
very good, a symbol of the new Chicago
that will further blot out the bad old days of Chicago’s industrial history. This is the narrative, by the way, that
defines the worldview of Mayor Rahm
Emanuel and the dazzling young urbanites who form the core of his constituency: Chicago is the new Emerald City, a town of “entertainment venues,” bicycle paths, high
tech crapshoots, and Potemkin prosperity, not the bad old sooty industrial town
on which we should close the history books.
The U.S. Steel South Works--in a busier (better?) time
You can see why such a narrative defines the typical Emanuel supporter’s view of the
world; after all, s/he, having grown up in the suburbs and having no roots in
the city, and certainly no recent roots in the city’s working class, care not a
whit about what made Chicago Chicago but care very much about imposing their
vision of a hip, chic, trendy new age city on all of us.
But think about this for awhile.
Yes, the old South
Works complex was dirty and the neighborhoods it spawned were gritty,
tough, and bereft of fern bars, yogurt stores, cutesy-pie “coffee shops” (as
currently defined, i.e., trendy Starbucks places, not diners by another name),
jazz bars, trendy boutiques, and other necessities of newly urban life. But the Works, and thousands of factories like
it on a smaller scale, provided a decent living for thousands of families, good
paying jobs for guys (very few women worked in such environments) trying to
grab the first rung on the ladder to the American
Dream despite their lack of education or family or political
connections. The Works generated tax
revenues for the city and spawned innumerable businesses, mostly small, on its
periphery. The Works, while dirty and
sooty and smelly, made some people rich and a lot of people well off enough to
buy a small home and maybe send the kids to college.
On the other hand, the Obama
Library will surely be environmentally pristine. It will provide a few jobs for academics who
want to further navel gaze about the momentous accomplishments of Barack Obama in addition to maybe a few
hundred minimum wage jobs for docents, janitors, security people, greeters,
etc. It will not pay property or other
taxes to the city and its wage base will be so small as to provide no
meaningful income tax revenue to the state.
Its inevitable gift shop will provide a pittance of sales taxes. Rather than generate appreciable revenue
like, say, a factory, it will require massive subsidies ($100 million, at this early
stage) from an already bankrupt state, and maybe city, to build and run. It will make a very few people (like the politically
connected Dan McCaffery and other
friends of and contributors to Rahm
Emanuel and Barack Obama) rich
and place an only slightly larger number just barely above water.
This is progress, according to the Sun-Times, the Emanuel
Administration, and others with their own imported vision of what
constitutes a great city.
Of course the South Works specifically, and steel and other
heavy manufacturing, will never come back to Chicago along with their high paying
jobs and other economic stimulation; natural
economic evolution, plus trade
policies seemingly designed to further widen the income and wealth gaps in
this country, have ordained such activities on the new urban landscape to a
permanent death. Rahm Emanuel’s
supporters cheer the death of industrial Chicago
from the comfort of their climate controlled and oh, so immaculate offices and
the trendy bars and restaurants they, like the obedient sheep they are, must
frequent if they are to be part of the acceptable crowd.
But would it be such a bad thing if Chicago
still had an industrial base? Think
about the good paying blue collar jobs
huge, and not so huge, industrial complexes like the South Works provided to people with little education but a lot of
desire to work to get on that first rung on the inter-generational climb to a
comfortable middle class lifestyle. What if those jobs were still around? Would we be having the crime problems we are
having in Chicago right now if
there were jobs around that would afford people throughout our city the
opportunity to buy and stay in homes, form families and communities and support
those families and communities? What if
men and women, despite a lack of aptitude for high tech jobs, the legal and
banking gigs, and other jobs Mr. Emanueland his “better” base deem acceptable, were able to go to work right out of
high school, support families, and build some degree of wealth? Would that be such a bad thing?
Oh, I forgot; giving people at the bottom real economic and financial opportunity
would involve making a few yuppies “uncomfortable” with the condition of the environment
and the possible spread of blue collar communities into the chic urban habitats
Mr. Emanuel and his supporters deem acceptable for people of their lofty
stature. And so the response of the near
north upscale crowd to the very notion of an industrial revival must be
“Let them get law
degrees and MBAs!”
The Emanuel core need not worry, though; Chicago will never
reindustrialize and the lower classes in this town will have to consign
themselves to menial, low wage jobs at the “entertainment venues” that seem to
form the core of every one of the Mayor’s economic revival proposals…if they
can get jobs at all. And the consequent
urban blight will never reach those communities around the core of downtown,
with their trendy bars and hipster hangouts and stupid restaurants at which the
bill is in inverse proportion to the quantities served, that these bleating
sheep inhabit.
See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of
Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge,
A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on
how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.
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