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Chicago's Mayor Richard M. Daley will receive the Trustees' Award for Outstanding Achievement in Public Policy by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Trust's President Richard Moe will present the award on Thursday, Nov. 2, during the National Trust's National Preservation Conference in Los Angeles.

Chicago preservationists decry this as an outrage. Roosevelt University Professor Steve Balkin has been working for 8 years trying to preserve the old Maxwell Street neighborhood, the city's immigrant gateway and the birthplace of urban electric Blues, root music of rock and roll. This culturally significant historic working class and minority area will soon be obliterated and replaced by parking lots, a few facades, and a publicly subsidized upscale condo and retail complex. One of the Chicago's Blues legends, 69 year old Jimmie Lee Robinson, is on a hunger fast to protest this destruction.

Balikin says, "At every step of the way, Daley and his real estate development cronies thwarted us. What could have been a win-win was turned into a big lose. What Daley does in Chicago is terrible public policy that destroys historic buildings and creates sprawl. He is elitist. He assaults poor neighborhoods, decimates their history, and destroys affordable housing like they did in the discredited 'urban renewal = people removal' policies of the 1960s. To give Daley this honor is like giving Milosevic a human rights award."

Daley has permitted far more historic buildings to be destroyed than he has saved. Out of 17,000 historically and significant buildings in Chicago, only five were landmarked in 1999.

Preservationist and artist Barton Faist worked for 20 years trying to preserve the historic 1894 Tree Studios, the oldest existing artist studios in the United States. Faist says, "Anyone with eyes can see that we're losing our historic architecture block by block and our city is largely being replaced by cement and split-block bunkers."

Faist says further, "Even when a building receives official Chicago landmark status, it will not necessarily be saved from demolition or severe alteration as was the case for Navy Pier, the McGraw-Hill building, the Lexington Hotel, and Andrew Rebori's Fisher Studios. Some of these eventually even lost their landmark status. Thanks to Daley and his policies, Facadism is rampant in Chicago. It can become meaningless for a building to be an official Chicago landmark because it does not assure its preservation."

Balkin further says, "I thought the National Trust stood for smart growth. Daley's policies are dumb growth. Daley re-shuffles the population around to subsidize and create enclaves for the rich at the expense of the poor and our history, and he does it in such a way, with downzoning, that the city overall loses population; and property taxes are so high that it threatens even the middle class from being able to live in the central city. By promoting class separation, pushing out the poor, he is creating Soweto like townships in the suburbs, a new apartheid. It seems suspect for the National Trust to be giving this award to Daley."

See also the McCarthy building, destroyed early in Daley's tenure.

But under Daley, it's not just the city's historic buildings that are threatened--though they have been dropping like flied. Daley-style economic development has meant the continuous destruction of the very three-dimensional, walkable urban spaces of two and three story buildings that make Chicago what it is--along with their supporting infrastructure--and replacing them with suburban-style sprawl--unless, of course, they're in poor neighborhoods, in which case they get replaced with nothing.

Nowhere does the suburbanization of Chicago shine more brightly than at the Howard El, where Daley used the city's eminent domain power to knock down the neighborhood's commercial zone was knocked down to make way for a strip mall. Nelson Algren once wrote of the city containing churches that looked as if they'd been lifted from Warsaw or Prague and replaced brick by brick. Nowadays, Daley does that with strip malls that look as if they'd been lifted from Niles or Arlington Heights.

(The kinder, gentler face of the mayor's suburbanization scheme can be seen at the Old Town School of Folk Music, relocated to a historic library building in the Lincoln Square neighborhood at the cost of flattening much of the facing block to provide parking the new facility.)

The alternative scheme, disurbanization, can be found all along the Green Line, shut down for an extended rebuilding that chased away much of the ridership, then later reopened a mile short of its previous terminus at Stony Island Ave. Along the way, stations like the one at 61st Street have simply vanished, along with much of the surrounding neighborhood, leaving behind acres of overgrown solitude.

The result of Daley's urban removal policies are two cities, one sporting the green emptiness of Detroit, the other the asphalt sparseness of Schaumburg, neither recognizable as part of Chicago.

For more information visit these websites <http://www.openair.org/maxwell/preserve.html> and <http://www.maxwellstreet.org>.

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