American Pharaoh (93 page)

Community groups, and the public generally, were more sophisticated about the racial implications of urban planning than they
had been in the 1950s when the CAC drafted its first downtown development plan. Critics complained that Chicago 21 was a thinly
veiled attempt to move racial minorities farther from the Loop. This criticism had by now taken on a multicultural tone: Mexican-Americans
joined blacks in arguing that they were being targeted by urban-renewal bulldozers. Residents of the Near Southwest Side Pilsen
neighborhood, which had changed from being Czech, German, and Polish to Mexican, contended that the new development plans
called for pushing poor Latinos out and replacing them with middle-class whites. “They have good reason to fear,” said Douglas
Shorieder, vice president of the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “Most of the residents of these
communities are recent Mexican-American immigrants and low-income blacks who couldn’t afford to live in the communities if
rents and taxes increase.”
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Like the 1958 and 1967 plans, Chicago 21 was particularly concerned about the region south of the Loop, between downtown and
the Black Belt. The developers were looking to build a large middle-class residential development that would serve as a racial
barrier. The hope was that the new development would firm up the southern flank of the Loop, putting an island of middle-class
housing between downtown office buildings and businesses and the Black Belt ghetto and public housing projects to the south.
It was also intended to change the demographic mix of the residents and clientele of the central business district. Downtown
business leaders were looking for more middle-class customers and also, they admitted candidly, a greater percentage of whites.
The Loop businessmen were troubled by the current racial mix of downtown after-hours retailing, the
Chicago Tribune
reported in 1972, because “many whites [particularly suburbanites] stay away — not essentially because of prejudice, but
uneasiness.”
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There was a precedent for using a new middle-class housing development as a barrier between affluent areas and the ghetto.
In the late 1950s, residents of two wealthy North Side neighborhoods, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast, were worried the Near
North Side ghetto would spread toward them. In Lincoln Park, the fear was that blacks and Hispanics would move north over
the traditional racial boundary of North Avenue, known at the time as the area’s “Mason-Dixon line.” Residents of the Gold
Coast along the lakeshore were worried the ghetto would move east toward the lake. Daley declared a swath of poor housing
on the Near North Side to be an urban-renewal area, known as the Clark-LaSalle Redevelopment Project, and invited bids for
middle-class housing. The Chicago Land Clearance Commission spent $10 million, most of it federal money, to acquire and raze
blocks of old buildings on the site. Competition for the land was fierce, with two hundred developers sounding out the commission
about development rights. In the end, the rights to a ribbon of land a block wide and almost a half-mile long were awarded
to Arthur Rubloff to build a large middle-class housing development. Rubloff’s long, thin project, to be called Carl Sandburg
Village, was unmistakably designed to insulate Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast. It would also help protect North Michigan
Avenue, the burgeoning luxury retailing boulevard to the southeast. “That was Rubloff ’s argument, that we needed a massive
infusion of middle-class housing,” recalls Daley’s human rights commissioner, Edward Marciniak, “and that we needed to make
it large enough so it wouldn’t be swamped.” David Kennedy, chairman of the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company
of Chicago, provided $20 million in funding to start the project off. Carl Sandburg Village, which was developed between 1960
and 1975, worked exactly as planned. The sprawling development contained thousands of units of high-rise apartments and townhouses,
occupied by middle-class and overwhelmingly white tenants. Sandburg’s strip of middle-class housing separated the Gold Coast
from the thousands of public housing tenants in Cabrini-Green a few blocks west. It also formed an anchor for the area south
of North Avenue, preventing the black ghetto from spreading north into Lincoln Park.
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Chicago 21 proposed to do for the south end of the Loop what Carl Sandburg had done for the north end. By the early 1970s,
as a result of declining railroad passenger traffic and the rise of interstate trucking, the railroad land Daley had tried
to obtain for the University of Illinois campus was available. A group of downtown businessmen, led by Commonwealth Edison
president Thomas Ayers and Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Co. president John Perkins, united to form a corporation
to build a “new town” on the railroad land south of the Loop. Daley and his commissioner of development and planning, Lew
Hill, worked closely with the business community on the project. Private funds were used to purchase the land and construct
the buildings, but the city agreed to pay to build new streets, schools, and sewers.
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Dearborn Park, the “suburb in the city” that resulted, was a great success. Its apartment towers and town houses were soon
home to a community of thousands of middle-class professionals, both white and black. It was also successful in its role as
a racial barrier: it separated the poor, black population at the north end of the State Street Corridor from downtown Chicago.
Dearborn Park’s design created what critics called a fortress effect. All of the buildings faced inward, and the project’s
parks were to be fenced off and limited to residents. The project was also planned with no north-south through streets — only
streets running east and west. It appeared that the intention was to keep ghetto residents from driving up from the Black
Belt. “We think the general thrust of Chicago 21 is to prevent the poor, the blacks, and brown people living in the inner
ring around the Loop from ‘taking over’ the Loop,” the Coalition of Central Area Communities, an organization of low-income
residents, charged. But defenders of Dearborn Park say the purpose was more benign. “It was not racism . . . that drove the
plan,” says Lois Wille, a Chicago journalist who wrote a book about the development, “but an overriding conviction that the
project would fail unless prospective residents felt safe living there.”
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President Nixon flew into Chicago on a cold day in January 1974. Daley met him at O’Hare and escorted him downtown to his
appearance before the Executives Club. The Shannon Rovers, the mayor’s favorite musical group, greeted Nixon as he walked
into the Conrad Hilton. Daley had never failed to meet a president passing through Chicago, and he was not going to let the
fact that Nixon’s Justice Department was indicting his colleagues stop him from observing this protocol. But in other ways,
Daley was changing his ways. He was becoming less agile and less willing to appear in public in unstructured settings. He
was also getting increasingly nervous about security. He had guards posted at the front and rear of his home on South Lowe
Avenue, installed new bulletproof windows in his mayoral limousine, and began to have a tail car follow him. Daley also put
his office suite, where reporters once roamed and the public was once welcomed, off limits, with three uniformed policemen
standing guard. And when he approached City Hall now, his guards used two-way radios to alert police in the lobby, who in
turn prepared the elevator, making sure no stranger rode up with him.
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Daley’s close associates were continuing to get caught up in Thompson’s snare. In February 1974, an unlikely member of Daley’s
inner circle was indicted: Earl Bush, the mayor’s bespectacled word-smith. Bush, a former newspaper reporter, had not worked
his way up the ranks of the machine, and did not appear to operate by its loose moral code. But the U.S. attorney’s office
discovered that he had quietly acquired an ownership interest in Dell Airport Advertising, the company that had held the city
contract for advertising since 1962. Bush had recommended to a special city advisory committee that Dell receive the contract,
without disclosing his financial stake in the company. Bush, who made $202,000 from Dell between 1963 and 1973, was fired
by Daley after the news broke.
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Other Thompson indictments came in quick succession. In April, he indicted Tom Keane’s law partner, 49th Ward alderman Paul
Wigoda, for tax evasion. The charge against Wigoda arose out of a $50,000 payoff he allegedly accepted in return for zoning
the ninety-two-acre Edgewater Golf Course in a way that increased its development value. Days later, Matt Danaher, one of
Daley’s closest allies and a longtime protégé, was indicted. Danaher was a Bridgeporter who had followed closely in Daley’s
footsteps. His mother had asked Daley to get her son a job in 1948, and the young man started out as Daley’s driver. He went
on to serve as Daley’s administrative assistant, and then as his patronage aide, before being elected alderman in Daley’s
own 11th Ward. With Daley’s backing, Danaher had moved up to clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court. Danaher’s indictment
stemmed from charges, first reported in the
Chicago Sun-Times,
that he had received more than $300,000 in payoffs from two Chicago builders in exchange for voting for zoning changes to
clear the way to build a South Side subdivision. Word also leaked out that Danaher was being investigated by a federal grand
jury because he had allegedly failed to pay for a $20,000 remodeling job on his house at 3504 South Lowe, a few doors down
from the mayor.
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On May 2, Thompson indicted Tom Keane, the second most powerful man in Chicago government. Keane had once famously observed
of his days in public life that “Daley wanted power, and I wanted to make money, and we both succeeded.” Thompson investigated
how Keane made his money, and ended up indicting him on seventeen counts of mail fraud and one count of conspiracy. Keane
was charged with using his position in the City Council to purchase 218 parcels of tax-delinquent land going back to 1966
and then reselling it to city agencies like the Department of Urban Renewal and the CHA for a profit of 125 percent. Daley
stood by his City Council floor leader. “I’ve known him for many years,” Daley said. “He represents one of the finest families.
I know his wife and his children. I’m shocked that anything like this could happen.”
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Thompson would no doubt have been delighted to move on to Daley himself, but no indictment was forthcoming. His supporters
said the reason was simple: no matter what went on around him, Daley was not personally corrupt. Stahl, who ran Daley’s $60,000
contingency fund for four years, emphasizes that Daley was above reproach in his own financial dealings. “This was a totally
honest man,” Stahl insists. “He used it to send Sister so-and-so to Rome on the occasion of her 25th anniversary. He used
it to fix the holes in the roof of St. Stanislaw’s Catholic Church. It was like a little welfare fund. Not a penny went into
his pocket.” Daley also wanted City Hall to operate cleanly. Financial impropriety “was not part of the public trust we had,”
says Stahl. Daley may have presided over a system that was inherently corrupt. Jobs were given out on the basis of political
work, not ability to perform, and workers were fired if they did not fulfill their political obligations. Work for the Democratic
machine was routinely done on city time, and patronage employees were expected to kick back part of their salaries to their
ward organizations. Votes were stolen, and decisions of government bodies on matters like zoning were for sale. But there
is no evidence Daley ever gained financially from any of it.
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Thompson’s indictments were not the only legal troubles facing Daley in early 1974. Reports were circulating that John Daley,
twenty-seven, and William Daley, twenty-five had actually failed their 1971 insurance license tests, but that the exams had
been altered to provide them with passing scores. Several state officials charged that the exams bore signs of multiple erasures,
indicating that they had been tampered with. The Daleys had insisted that John and William knew nothing about the alleged
wrongdoing, and that the charges were politically motivated. But the scandal would not go away. In a county grand jury investigation,
Gordon Casper, a former state insurance examiner, testified that William Daley did not answer six essay questions on the exam
and would have failed it if Robert Wills, another former examiner, had not completed it for him. William Daley’s examination
allegedly had answers written in two different colors of ink from two pens. Another witness testified that on one of the Daley
tests the first 20 of the 120 multiple-choice questions were erased, and that in 19 of those 20 the answer was changed from
incorrect to correct. Casper told the grand jury that Wills wrote the answers to the essay questions on William Daley’s test
paper at the kitchen counter of Casper’s Springfield apartment. “Wills told me he was doing it because he wanted to do a favor
for [Senate minority leader Cecil] Partee,” Casper said. Then Wills spent about twenty minutes working on Daley’s paper, Casper
testified. Daley would later testify that he could not be certain whether the handwriting on the questionable answers was
his or not. “I’m not an expert,” he said. “I can’t be sure.” Casper, who was fired from his job as an insurance examiner,
was hired by the Employee Service Division of the State Labor Department. Wills, who also lost his job, got a new job — and
a pay raise — as a custodian in the State Archives, which was under the jurisdiction of secretary of state Michael Howlett.
Rumor had it that Partee had arranged for Wills’s new job, a possibility Partee himself did not entirely dismiss. “Whether
I helped Wills get a job as a custodian is a gray area,” Partee said. Daley continued to insist that the insurance-test flap
was politically motivated.“The idea apparently is if you can’t get at the father, attack the sons,” he said.
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