On a list of City Hall’s recent decisions, allowing a 100-foot cellular-phone tower to be built in Ravenswood would have to rank near the bottom in terms of controversy.
City Hall has known about the tower since November, when Cellular One requested a construction permit from the Department of Buildings. The proposed site was next to the commuter train tracks just east of the entrance to Rosehill Cemetery, whose intricately crafted gates are historical landmarks. The buildings department notified the Commission on Chicago Landmarks of the proposal, and one of Cellular One’s lawyers wrote the landmarks commission informing them that they had no grounds to block the tower since it was being erected outside the cemetery.
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The buildings department also notified the local alderman, Patrick O’Connor, as part of the monthly computer printout it sends him of all permit requests in the 40th Ward. O’Connor did not respond. Landmarks raised no objections. The tower seemed to conform with all zoning requirements. And so the permit was granted. Construction began in March.
City officials gently suggest that this section of Ravenswood Avenue, once an industrial corridor, is different than Michigan Avenue. The tower is across the street from a Commonwealth Edison substation and down the road from a vacant factory. And although the area is heavily residential, there are no houses within half a block in either direction of the tower. City officials admit that the public should have been notified, but their general attitude seems to be that if the city allowed too much participatory democracy nothing would ever get built.
But Friday came and went and the lawyer did not call. “I called him on the 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th of April,” she says. “I left messages with him on his voice mail and with his secretary.” It became clear that the lawyer wasn’t going to return her calls, generally a bureaucrat’s way of admitting powerlessness or indicating an irreversible decision has been made.
Buildings department officials say they are willing to take the blame. “We sent [O’Connor] a list of addresses where permits have been applied for, but we didn’t have this one marked in yellow,” says Chris Lynch, the department’s public information officer. “We didn’t say, “Hey, look, this is a tower.’ You really can’t fault the alderman. The bureaucracy was to blame.”
“There’s a warning here for other neighborhoods,” says Rattinger. “This is what happens when your city officials aren’t paying attention and your guard is down.”
