Chicago was officially 156 years old Thursday, but a stroll through City Hall provided ample evidence that there’s still plenty of life in the old girl.
For instance, in the course of an hour and a half Thursday morning, Mayor Richard Daley held back-to-back news conferences to praise city business leaders for supporting the arts, blast Gov. Jim Edgar for cutting money to the city, and complain that reporters haven’t given him enough credit for pushing for affirmative action in the city workforce.
Then Daley presided over a City Hall rotunda birthday party, with singers, balloons and pieces of cake for hundreds of people passing through the building’s lobby.
While the mayor was keeping himself busy, a group of Chicago aldermen dissatisfied with the labor union contract with the Fraternal Order of Police tried unsuccessfully for the third time in 10 days to hold a special City Council meeting to discuss affirmative action.
Once again, Ald. Lorraine Dixon (8th), the council’s president pro tempore, managed to gavel the meeting from opening to adjournment in less than a minute and a half after only 18 aldermen showed up, eight fewer than the required 26 needed for a quorum.
And once again, many of the aldermen who did manage to brave the snowy city streets to come to City Hall for a meeting that even some of its callers conceded was moot held their own impromptu news conferences to bemoan the lack of an affirmative action clause in the contract with Chicago’s police officers. The contract went into effect at the end of February after aldermen failed to act on it.
“This is an exercise in futility,” said Ald. Edward Burke (14th), a pro-Daley alderman who has showed up at each of the three abortive meetings to symbolically demonstrate that the mayor’s forces were not totally boycotting the sessions. “But people are entitled to make a political statement, and this is what this is intended to be.”
Although most of the disgruntled aldermen held their news conferences after the truncated council session, Ald. Joseph Moore (49th), Ald. Eugene Schulter (47th) and Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd) had led a big group of supporters into the City Hall press room earlier in the day to call for more city funding to restore cuts in city library hours.
Coming a day after Edgar announced what he wants to be a big cut in state funds to Illinois municipalities, Moore acknowledged that the timing for his news conference might have been a little better. But he said he would forge ahead at next Monday’s regular council meeting to add about $4 million to the library budget. He said he didn’t know where the money should come from and would let Daley figure that out.
While frustrated aldermen continued to seethe in the nearly empty City Council chambers on the second floor, Daley was showing a bit of pique himself in his news conferences on the fifth floor.
Although he congratulated a group of Chicago-area businessmen for pledging $100 million to help finance building development programs for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera, he got testy when discussing Edgar’s proposed 1993 budget, which could leave a big $65 million hole in his own municipal budget.
And when asked by reporters why he didn’t single out police union President John Dineen as the villain in the simmering affirmative action controversy, he nearly erupted.
“What am I supposed to do? Rant and rave?” asked Daley, urging reporters to note that he pushed for affirmative action during arbitration proceedings with the union.
Affirmative action was a big priority for him, Daley said, “big, bigger and biggest.”
But even in City Hall, parties have a way of mellowing people, and Daley ended his morning by going down to the lobby to watch the cast of the suburban Summit-based musical, “Five Guys Named Moe,” dance about, singing, “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby.”
While the mayor watched the singers, Gary Mack, Edgar’s Chicago press secretary, strolled over to the proceedings from his State of Illinois Center office across Randolph Street (but without the Charleston Republican governor). Mack even good-humoredly posed for photographs with Jim Williams, Daley’s press secretary, in a city birthday display of good will.
Sure, while Daley was congratulating the city on enduring 156 years, one person in the crowd shouted out, “Chicago was started by a black man, it should be governed by a black man.” But the mayor ignored those shouts and even saluted fur trader Jean Baptiste du Sable as the city’s original founder.
“The city works as well now as it did then,” Daley said.
Then cake was served in the lobby, while throughout the city, snow was being plowed, garbage was being picked up, water pipes flowed, and people went on about their everyday lives.
At 156, Chicago observed another birthday and showed no signs of slowing down.
