By Michael Miner
A familiar name in Chicago political circles, Jacky Grimshaw coordinates transportation programs at the Center for Neighborhood Technology; she’s also codirector of the Chicagoland Transportation and Air Quality Commission, a coalition that’s developing its own long-range regional transportation plan. When she spoke at a recent public hearing in New Lenox against the North-South extension, accusing Springfield of neglecting the city in favor of pushing new roads into the corn belt, the Tribune deemed the hearing a local event and slashed its coverage in half for city consumption. Grimshaw’s testimony didn’t make the cut.
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The Sun-Times reported the vote but not Grimshaw’s denunciation of it, and neither daily concerned itself with the “inaccurate information” on which the vote was purportedly based. The city had found a way to claim that the people of Woodlawn had spoken–and now the papers were going along with the joke.
Munson’s being generous calling the 56 percent figure faulty. It’s a hobo stew of a number, concocted by tossing into one pot testimony heard at a public hearing March 12, written and telephoned opinions that came in over the next two weeks, a phone survey conducted by the Woodlawn Organization (T.W.O.), and petitions distributed by pro- and anti-demolition forces.
Petitions fetched 1,802 signatures in favor of renovating and using the el and 1,637 in favor of razing it. And T.W.O. reported that its telephone survey turned up 534 respondents who wanted to tear the el down, 123 who wanted to keep it up, and 11 who were neutral.
But the city isn’t blaming division alone. It’s accepted the argument that the 63rd Street el itself — which Smith reminded me was built more than a century ago for the long-obsolete purpose of bringing visitors to the Columbian Exposition–has slowly smothered the street it stands on. Now that prominent local interests are promising a wave of new construction once it’s gone, the city wants to get moving.
Grimshaw and Munson don’t buy this. They believe that development can come with the el as well as without it and is, in fact, already on the way. “Much of this new development is occurring within three to four blocks of the long-promised Dorchester station,” Munson argued last month in a letter published by the Tribune. But once rapid transit’s lost, it’s gone forever. “An over-reliance on cars will choke off development, not encourage it,” he wrote.
