The maps in Howard Learner’s office tell the story all too well: since 1960 the cornfields of Lake County have been plowed into parking lots, as thousands of industrial jobs have left Chicago.
In addition, there’s a heated debate about the possible environmental devastation of paving wetlands and cornfields. And many Lake and Will County residents say the new toll roads will make congestion worse–by opening the area to more development and encouraging more people to drive. In short, say tollway opponents, Chicago taxpayers are being asked to subsidize their city’s demise as the state pays billions of dollars to create more traffic congestion, kill trees, add more toxins to the air, and in general make life more miserable for everyone except the lawyers, engineers, and construction crews who feed from this public trough. Learner’s organization is trying to rally opposition to the toll roads in Chicago as well as the suburbs.
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As Learner notes, the opulent headquarters in Downers Grove is located at 1 Authority Drive and is nicknamed the Taj Mahal. “Everyone calls it that,” says Learner, “even the authority’s supporters.”
The proposed roadway would run through Grayslake resident Helga Ziegler’s apple orchard, uprooting more than 1,500 trees. “There are over 400 houses that get destroyed and more than 40 nature preserves that get destroyed under the proposal,” Ziegler told a reporter for the Daily Herald. “Let’s open our mouths and say, ‘My God, I don’t want this because there are people who live here.’”
When last seen in these pages, Jeff Spitz was a recently arrived refugee from Los Angeles completing a documentary on Roosevelt University (Neighborhood News, March 21, 1986).
One segment tells the story of Charles Shipp, a baseball player at Chicago Vocational High School; another is about a gathering of precocious young poets, most of them teenagers, who want nothing less than to “change the world.”
