The Chicago Reader reports on Obama's Hyde Park and how "the man" who runs Chicago got brought in:
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.
With the vote to “reinstate prohibition,” as an editorial in the student-run Chicago Maroon put it, the residents effectively killed the university’s plans to replace the old Doctors Hospital of Hyde Park at 5800 S. Stony Island and replace it with two hotels.
So now the university doesn’t know what it’s going to do with the property, which was vacated after the hospital went bankrupt in 2000.
How did they pull that one off?
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.
For
more on Alderman Ed Burke.For a look at Alderman Burke's association with
The Chicago Mob and other subjects.
