American Pharaoh (41 page)

In the end, Daley’s plans for the University of Illinois–Chicago destroyed two neighborhoods. The toll inflicted by the new campus was obvious in Harrison-Halsted, which lost as many as 14,000 residents and 630 businesses. But Garfield Park, which Daley deprived of the campus, was the second victim. The neighborhood’s decline, which was already under way, picked up speed after the decision was made to build the university elsewhere. Middle-class residents put their homes up for sale and, in the familiar cycle, poor blacks moved in. Within years, lower-middle-class Garfield Park had become one of Chicago’s worst slums. In 1965, West Garfield Park would become famous as the site of an unfortunate fatality caused by an outof-control fire truck, which prompted massive riots among the neighborhood’s alienated slum-dwellers. The seeds for that unrest were planted when Daley prevented the University of Illinois trustees from building the campus there. The Loop’s gain was, undeniably, Garfield Park’s loss.
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The new University of Illinois campus had just the economic and racial impact on the Harrison-Halsted neighborhood that Loop business leaders had hoped for. Before the arrival of the campus, it was one of the few racially integrated neighborhoods in the city. In 1960, 3,500 blacks lived in the neighborhood, about 15 percent of the population. Some lived in the Jane Addams Houses, but many more did not. A decade later, after the campus was completed, the black population had fallen to 2,900. But the biggest change was that almost all of them now lived in the Jane Addams Houses census tracts. With the campus standing between Jane Addams and the Loop, virtually all of the blacks who lived in this neighborhood abutting the Loop were now separated from downtown by an enormous physical barrier. The neighborhood also underwent an economic transformation. From 1961 to 1965, the cost of land in the area doubled, and from 1965 to 1971 it doubled again. The result of siting the campus in Harrison-Halsted was that a neighborhood that was once becoming more racially diverse was transformed into a far whiter “island of higher incomes and land values.”
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The other large institution Daley had long hoped to bring to Chicago was a modern airport. The idea for a new Chicago airport dated back as early as 1944, when the Chicago Plan Commission called for the development of “an airport which will make Chicago the center of aviation.” The need for a world-class airport was undeniable. Chicago had, by the 1940s, established itself as the regional aviation hub for the entire Midwest. By the end of the decade, Chicago was the first city in the country to average more than one thousand plane movements a day, twice as many as New York City. Chicago Municipal Airport, now Midway Airport on the Southwest Side, would not be able to keep up with the city’s air traffic much longer.
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Although the need was clear, efforts to get a new airport built continually stalled. In March 1946, the U.S. Air Force donated 1,080 acres of land and a small hangar to the city, which would have made an ideal site, but no one could agree on how to fund construction and operation of the airport itself. At the time, New York’s La Guardia Field was running deficits of $1 million a year, and Chicago’s airports had also been money-losers. Mayor Kelly tried to arrange a combination of federal and state funds and usage fees from the airline industry, but the airlines balked. They refused to switch flights over to the new airport if its fees were any greater than at Municipal. The City Council authorized the purchase of additional land, bringing the site up to 7,000 acres, but when Mayor Kelly left office the question of how to build and operate the airport remained at an impasse. The domestic airlines flying into the city organized themselves into a bargaining committee, called the Chicago Airlines Top Committee, composed of one executive from each airline. In March 1949, the airlines notified the city that they were interested in a new airport, but they did not say how much they would be willing to pay. Mayor Kennelly signed an ordinance on June 28, 1949, naming the proposed new airport O’Hare Field, after a World War II aviation hero. There was some limited construction on the O’Hare site in the early 1950s, but it was hamstrung by lack of financing. The federal Civil Aeronautics Board allocated $1.8 million, the state contributed $1.17 million, and the federal government came up with another $1.6 million for construction of an 8,000-foot runway. But the overall problem of financing O’Hare was far from settled, and until it was the airlines were refusing to shift any flights to it.
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As soon as Daley became mayor in 1955, he began working to end the impasse over the funding of O’Hare. In his first weeks in office, he sent telegrams to top executives of each airline inviting them to meet with him in Chicago, bypassing the intransigent Chicago Airlines Top Committee. Daley had no trouble convincing them that air traffic at Midway was excessive, and that some of it would need to shift to O’Hare. The hard part was bringing the airlines around on finances, the subject that had tripped up previous mayors. Daley hammered away at the airlines, arguing that they were not doing their part. He “made us feel cheap about some of the things,” United Airlines president William Patterson said later. In the end, the airlines agreed to assume the cost of operating O’Hare, in a sixty-seven-page document that committed both sides for the next fifteen years. “It is the only contract of its kind,” Daley declared, “where a city has operations costs completely guaranteed on a major airport.” With financing firmly in place, an air show was held at O’Hare on October 29, 1955, to mark the airport’s official opening. It was, at 6,393 acres, the largest airfield in the nation, more than 1,000 acres larger than New York’s Idlewild Field, later renamed John F. Kennedy Airport. Regular commercial flights began the next day.
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Despite his breakthroughs on financing and securing airline traffic, Daley’s work on O’Hare was far from done. The airport was located outside Chicago’s corporate limits. That meant that even though the city owned the land, technically it might not even be a Chicago airport. The city’s lawyers had advised Daley that, among other problems, there could be legal disputes over Chicago’s police powers on the site. Daley proposed in February 1956, to annex five miles of Route 72, also known as Higgins Road, to connect the airport to the city. The nearby suburbs opposed this “O’Hare Corridor,” and two of them announced their own plans for annexing parts of Higgins Road. Daley responded by inviting the suburban officials to a meeting in City Hall. If the suburbs agreed to his annexation plans, he told them, he would promise not to annex any additional land near the airport that could get in the way of their own plans to expand. “Chicago is not interested in interfering with plans of other communities in any way,” he assured them. The suburbs agreed to Daley’s terms, and two weeks later the Chicago City Council voted 48–0 to annex O’Hare Field and connect it to Chicago through Higgins Road. But it did not take long for Daley to renege on his part of the bargain. In March, Schiller Park voted to annex part of a county forest preserve that lay between Chicago and the airport — precisely the land Daley promised not to interfere with. At Daley’s behest, the City Council voted to annex most of the remainder of the forest preserve for Chicago.
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Even though O’Hare was now formally connected to Chicago, transportation between the airport and downtown remained a problem. There was no direct highway link, and some wags had taken to dubbing O’Hare “the only airport in the world accessible only by air.” The Northwest Expressway, later renamed the Kennedy, was supposed to provide a direct highway connection. It had been envisioned thirty-three years earlier in a report of the Chicago Plan Commission, but it had been bogged down in the same kind of delays as the airport it was supposed to connect to. Before Daley was elected mayor, a cash-strapped Cook County had agreed to hand over part of the expressway to the state’s toll highway system. When Daley took office, he immediately set out to reverse that decision. He was opposed, on principle, to charging a toll for the trip to the airport, but he also had other objections. Toll roads were barred by state law from including median strips for mass transportation, and they were ineligible for federal highway funds — and Daley wanted his expressway to have both. Daley worked out an agreement with the Toll Commission and the Cook County Board to make the expressway toll-free. By the time it was completed on November 5, 1960, federal funds paid for 90 percent of the road’s $300 million construction cost.
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A decade later, as Daley had hoped, a rapid transit line was opened in the median strip.

Daley wanted to expand O’Hare, but he was looking for a way to do it without saddling the city with costs. Daley’s agreement with the airlines left them with the obligation to pay for the airport, and he called for a new round of negotiations. The talks began in the office of the commissioner of public works, but when the airlines and the city could not agree, they shifted to the mayor’s office. The two sides met every ten to fourteen days for a period of about three months, but each side had nonnegotiable demands the other side would not agree to. Just when the deadlock seemed unresolvable, Daley got up from his chair, looked around the room, and announced that the city would waive all of its remaining conditions if the airlines did the same. The airlines met for ten minutes outside, and when they returned a United Airlines lawyer announced that the airlines accepted. The airlines agreed to a revenue bond issue for construction of new jet facilities, to be paid off by airport revenue, but guaranteed by the airlines in case the revenues fell short. This pact achieved Daley’s goal of getting the airport completed without taxpayer dollars. With the funding settled, Daley announced new plans for expansion and renovation of O’Hare. They were more ambitious than the airlines wanted — the costs were being estimated at $120 million — but in the end they agreed to put up a forty-year bond. O’Hare’s status as the world’s first self-sustaining airport was preserved.
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O’Hare’s passenger service buildings were completed in the summer of 1961, and Daley took a tour of them on August 29. The new buildings were “magnificent . . . showplaces of which Chicago justly will be proud,” he declared. “No one could fail to be impressed when he stands at the passenger service level and looks for 750 feet past scores of ticket counters and entrances, framed in the wonderful glass walls,” Daley said. “And this, remember, is repeated in two buildings.” On January 15, 1962, the new O’Hare terminal complex was dedicated. Daley was part of a contingent of two hundred VIP visitors who were given a tour of the new facility, examining ticket counters, passenger waiting areas, and luggage weighing stations. To some critics it was all too much. One newspaper calculated that the longest distance between transfers, if the passenger made no mis-steps, was 4,200 feet — or four-fifths of a mile. In 1962, O’Hare became the world’s busiest airport.

O’Hare stands as one of Daley’s most impressive legacies, but it was not immune from the machine’s usual rules for doing business. The critical $120 million bond issue that allowed final construction to go forward was awarded to a syndicate of five banking houses through a process of “negotiation” rather than competitive bidding. While the City Council was rubber-stamping the deal Daley had worked out with these politically connected banks, the city comptroller claimed that competitive bidding would have been impossible in this situation. Also without competitive bidding, Norman Drug Stores was awarded a ten-year contract to operate the airport’s two drugstores. Critics said that the contracts shortchanged the city, but Daley defended the decision. “Our interest was to protect the public,” he said. “While we could have obtained a higher percentage, perhaps, we might not have got the quality operation we do have out there.”
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Worse revelations were yet to come. When the airport opened for business, it turned out that the right to sell flight insurance at the airport had been awarded exclusively to a single company, Airport Sales Corp., whose corporate parent had retained Tom Keane for the previous eight years. Another company, Tele-Trip, came forward to reveal that it had substantially underbid Airport Sales — proposing to charge $3.75 rather than $5 per $150,000 in passenger insurance. When the company submitted its bid to Daley’s aviation commissioner, it said, the bid was ignored. It also came out that another company that had hired Keane, New York–based Malan Construction, had been awarded $35 million in work at O’Hare. Among the projects given to Malan was a $5.4 million airplane hangar, a decision reportedly made over the protests of the city’s public works commissioner and the airport architects. In the 1963 mayoral election, Republican Benjamin Adamowski would charge that Daley personally waived almost $1 million in penalties against Malan for failing to complete parts of the airport on time. The airport was being run, Adamowski charged, as “a private concession for Tom Keane.”
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