It’s no secret the city has been trying to put its best face forward in the weeks and months leading up to the International Olympic Committee’s decision Friday on whether Chicago will host the Olympics in 2016. When the committee visited Chicago in April for an inspection, city workers were spotted sprucing up potential Olympics sites, while downtown merchants hung welcome banners and planted flowers, according to news reports.
Yet Matt Smith, spokesman for Chicago’s Department of Streets and Sanitation, says the city hasn’t recently increased its beautification schedule to attract the Olympics — the amount of effort focused downtown is the same as it has always been.
“The city does a fantastic job with downtown,” said Ty Tabing, executive director of the Loop Alliance, a Loop promotional group. “Chicago is one of the cleanest big cities in the world; in short, that’s the feedback that we get.”
With the International Olympic Committee just days away from making its decision, RedEye explored the city’s efforts to shine its crown jewel, the Loop area.
It takes a small army to keep Chicago’s central business district pristine. One, many times two, street sweepers tackle the downtown arterial streets twice a day, on average, while 10 to 20 workers typically are assigned to pick up garbage on the street daily. Each residential ward typically sees one street sweeper each day, Smith said.
Residential sanitation efforts are coordinated by the individual ward offices. The Loop community area — defined by the city as south and east of the Chicago River and north of Roosevelt Road — is part of the 2nd and 42nd Wards.
Separately, the Bureau of Street Operations maintains the area bounded by Lake Michigan on the east, Halsted Street on the west, North Avenue on the north and Cermak Road on the south. Services include hand sweeping of sidewalks and streets, emergency street cleaning, emptying of waste baskets, limited power washing and removing snow, ice and graffiti.
On any given day shift, there are anywhere from 18 to 38 Loop operation workers, Smith said.
Tabing said business owners take it upon themselves to maintain their piece of the Loop. For the last decade, the Loop Alliance has had a State Street cleaning program — Clean Slate for State Street, which employs workers to remove snow and regularly power wash sidewalks. State Street residents pay for their services with extra taxes, typically about 5 percent of their property tax assessment, Tabing said.
And tourists seem to notice. Former tour guide Michael LaRusso said tourists — typically from the East Coast and Brazil — regularly ask where Chicago ships its garbage because the city looks so clean.
“Definitely, most of the tourists of the cities from the East Coast say for the size of the city, it keeps quite clean,” said LaRusso, tour manager of the Chicago Tour Guides Institute, which supplies local tour guides and interpreters to meeting planners.
But tourists from California, Oregon and Florida tend not to be impressed with Chicago’s cleanliness and instead boast of their own city’s sanitary conditions, LaRusso said.
Indeed, Chicago isn’t known as the Queen of Clean nationally. Forbes failed to mention the Windy City in its list last year of the 10 cleanest American cities. And Chicago also rated dead last in Reader’s Digest’s 2005 list of the 50 cleanest American cities. The City that Works scored few points in water and air quality but ranked moderately well in terms of sanitation.
Chicago’s air and water quality fared much better in a recent report evaluating the four cities battling to host the Olympics, but the city’s overall cleanliness wasn’t mentioned. And yet, a city’s cleanliness is an important factor in whether the city will land the Games, Olympics researcher Stephen Alexander told RedEye.
“We didn’t see the cleanliness as a major issue but obviously if you’re going to put on a good face and have the committee come, you want the streets clean,” said Alexander, a DePaul senior research fellow who has been studying Chicago’s Olympics plan for two years. “The research shows all host cities kind of clean up areas.”
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tswartz@tribune.com
