Debbie Crowther, 37, left Rome to become a flight attendant for American Airlines. Chris Perkins, 25, left his job as Goofy at Disneyworld. Brent Lawlis, 22, left a Texas Chevrolet dealership. And Brooke Holderby, 21, left community college and her parents.
The four strangers, all searching for new beginnings, became friends over the summer at American’s seven-week training school in Dallas. When each was assigned Chicago as a home base, they found a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment together in Printers’ Row, blocks from the CTA’s Blue Line to O’Hare.
Then came Sept. 11. Within weeks, all four were furloughed from their new $14,000 a year jobs, and they have since been scrambling to reorder their suddenly chaotic lives.
What happened in Apartment 602 is just one of the countless aftershocks of the attacks on New York and Chicago. Far away from the East Coast, four people found their lives diverted.
With no income, no ties to Chicago and no eligibility for unemployment benefits in Illinois, three have already left the state to live with friends or family until they can find work. The fourth, Crowther, is planning to move home to Michigan this week to take care of his ailing mother.
More than a month after the attacks, the ripple effects keep coming. Though all four rookie flight attendants immediately volunteered to work when the airports reopened, Lawlis, who returned home to Grapevine, Texas, is now afraid to fly. Perkins, who had wanted to be a flight attendant since he was a freshman in high school, went home to Pennsylvania and plans to live with friends in Florida until he can find a job. He’d like to work at Disneyworld again, but with tourism down, he isn’t optimistic.
Holderby, of Longview, Texas, had found another apartment and planned to look for a job here, but she recently learned she must file for unemployment in her home state because she wasn’t based in Chicago long enough. She’s moving her things back to her parents’.
And Crowther, affectionately known as “the mother hen” by her former roommates and the only one left in Chicago, now has her hands full with her own mother, Phyllis Crowther, who recently had hip replacement surgery at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center and can’t drive for three months.
Initially, Phyllis Crowther was going to recover in Chicago at her daughter’s apartment, where she could get outpatient services, including physical therapy and meals on wheels. Now Debbie plans to take her back to their home in St. Clair Shores, Mich., to convalesce after a doctor’s appointment Thursday.
“It’s a shame. I love Chicago, but my choices are to live in Chicago without a job or help my mom, and it’s obvious I need to go home and help the family,” Crowther said. “Now I’m the only one in the position to do it.”
Another major problem lingers: Apartment 602 itself.
The flight attendants have paid rent through October and are obligated through August unless it is re-rented.
So far, they haven’t subleased the $1,680 per month apartment, and the property management company isn’t letting them out of the lease.
“We realize we signed a binding contract, but these are extenuating circumstances,” said Crowther, who worked as an operations manager at Hard Rock Cafe in Italy before changing careers. “We all thank god we weren’t working on the 11th and that we have the possibility to go on with our lives, but we need that chance to go home. I don’t know why they can’t just terminate the lease.”
Inside the management offices of Waterton Property Management, which owns Printers’ Square, an old printing warehouse that was converted into 356 apartment units, employees have miniature American flags on their desks. A sign: “Bless the U.S.: United We Stand” hangs on the wall.
There is plenty of sympathy here, property manager Penny Hughes said, but the company can’t rip up the lease, especially when other people have lost jobs, other units are vacant, the market is down and winter, a notoriously bad rental time, is approaching.
“Things are really, really bad right now. There’s very little traffic,” Hughes said. “We’ve told them we’ll do everything we can, we’ll work with them, we won’t compound legal fees [if they don’t pay their rent], but we won’t promise them anything we won’t do for other tenants.
“What happens with the fellow from Aon who lives here comes in and says, `My job is gone? Or what about the man down the hall who is terminally ill and wants to break his lease so he can live his last six months with his relatives? I could have 100 people in here [trying to break leases].”
