Let’s just honor everybody with statues on the Illinois capitol grounds

The “Christmas Tree bill.” It was a phrase I always particularly detested from my days back when I covered the Illinois Statehouse scene.

Do we really need Thompson ...

The term applies to a piece of legislation that gets so many people adding on their pet projects to the original idea (usually completely unrelated) – in hopes that all the other things give political support to something that might not gain political favor if it stood all on their own.

WHAT I AWAYS hated about the phrase was the cutesiness of it; as though people were trying to legitimize the idea of piling on so many unrelated items onto one bill so to force approval of something that many might detest.

But that is the reality of our government – the concept that some people feel they’re entitled to “get” something for themselves in exchange for their political votes.

If you think about it too much, it really is greedy. As well as legitimizing some fairly worthless legislation.

This was the thought that crossed my mind when I read a recent report in the State Journal-Register newspaper of Springfield – one that told of efforts to pass a bill calling for various statues to be erected on the Capitol grounds. Technically, Christmas Tree bills relate to the state budget, so this isn’t one. But it certainly shares the spirit.

... or Harold Washington along ...

THE MEASURE STARTED out with the desire by some to have a statue set up to honor the memory of one-time President Ronald Reagan. He may have lived the bulk of his life in California (and served as a governor there before moving up to the federal level).

But Reagan was born in Dixon, Ill., lived one year of his childhood in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, and attended college in Eureka, Ill. – before leaving the Land of Lincoln for an adult life elsewhere. Let’s not forget his eventual wife, Nancy, was a Chicago native (and a student at the Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park).

That has the ideologues amongst us determined to shove his memory down the throat of everybody. To enhance the chance that people wouldn’t vote against it for partisan reasons, there also was a suggestion that another statue be erected to the memory of Barack Obama – the one-time state senator from Hyde Park who eventually rose to the presidency.

... to get a Statehouse tribute to Obama ...

But that’s where the piling on started.

FOR IT SEEMS that some people tried suggesting a third statue – one for James R. Thompson, the man who served as Illinois governor (14 years) longer than anybody else.

That begat thoughts of honoring one-time Illinois State Federation of Labor president Reuben Soderstrom. Others tried throwing into the mix a statue of Harold Washington – a one-time state representative who eventually became Chicago’s first black mayor.

Thus far, it seems that the weight of so much bronze and/or marble is such that it is killing off the entire concept. But the legislator sponsoring the original bill told the Springfield newspaper says it’s natural to include a few extra people in the honors if it means he can get his original intent – which is to make us think of “the Gipper” himself as an Illinois native.

... or Ronald Reagan?

Even though you could argue that Reagan left us Illinoisans behind – unlike Obama, the Hawaii native, who came to us in Illinois and Chicago to achieve his greatness. Similar to Abraham Lincoln – who came to Illinois for an adult life that achieved intense success, which is why his statue on Capitol grounds occupies a prominent place up front.

BUT YOU JUST know the idea of an Obama statue solo would offend some, while others are bothered by the idea of ANY KIND of Reagan tribute.

It reminds me of when the General Assembly some two decades ago renamed a portion of Interstate 88 in the northwestern suburbs for Ronald Reagan. To get others whose memories of Reagan are less than favorable to go along, we got the renaming of the one-time Calumet Expressway for Bishop L.H. Ford. – head of the Church of God in Christ and a man of significance in certain South Side neighborhoods.

FORD: His freeway a Reagan toll road trade

Although as I remember it, even then the Legislature passed separate bills – with all the Reagan backers expected to go along and vote for Bishop Ford as well. Our state government, hard at work!

The end result being all these years of radio traffic reports every morning talking of the latest congestion on the Bishop Ford Freeway. And at least a few wiseacres responding with, “Who?”

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EXTRA: What warrants Obama brand for posterity (or maybe that long)?

Out in south suburban Markham is an elementary school named for Barack Obama, while a quickie search of the Internet uncovered schools in Dallas, Los Angeles and Milwaukee named for the nation’s 44^th president.
 

OBAMA: Does he need a highway too?

Which intrigues me because our federal government’s current leadership seems determined to erase anything and everything that ever occurred during the Obama years. If they succeed, will students of the future attend schools named for someone who left nothing lasting behind?

WE’RE GOING TO spend the next few years, perhaps even decades, pondering the Obama legacy – between those who want to erect tributes to it in marble and whose who want to be the equivalent of the pidgeon that dumps its waste all over it.

So it will be interesting to see how things wind up this year with a pair of bills now pending in the Illinois General Assembly, being sponsored by legislators who want Obama to be something equivalent of John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson II or Dan Ryan.

As anybody who drives around Chicago on a regular basis knows, those men all have major highways named after them. In fact, I’d bet most people only know the Ryan as a South Side highway and don’t have a clue who the former Cook County Board president really was!

We do seem to have a split.

 

STEVENSON: Can he share I-55 w/ Obama?

ONE BILL SAYS we ought to rename Interstate 294, also known as the Tri-State Tollway, for Obama. It would be a major road used heavily every day by traffic in the Chicago area, and some think it cute that it connects Illinois to Indiana and Wisconsin – all of which are states Obama took in the Electoral College in his 2008 presidential victory.

Of course, the smart alecks point out that the Tri-State is the road used by traffic to avoid having to enter the Chicago city limits.

 

RYAN: A highway, more than a man?

But there is another bill calling for the bulk of Interstate 55 in Illinois to be named for Obama. As things stand, the Chicago portion of that highway already is named for Adlai.

In fact, I suspect most Chicago motorists would get a confused look on their faces if you speak of I-55; but Stevenson Expressway will create a slew of stories of traffic congestion they have had to endure.

 

FORD: Name has new freeway fame

ALTHOUGH I SUSPECT this bill is politically loaded – there will be the rural Illinois residents who will object to having one of “their roads” being used for an Obama tribute. Yet you try to dump the name of Adlai E. from the Chicago portion of I-55, and that will create a bigger stink because people will have to learn a new name for telling people what road they were caught in traffic on during the morning rush hour.

These measures are going to create quite the political brawl; particularly since I already sense how offended the “loser” (as in the one whose idea gets rejected) will take it personally.

Will we get some people out there determined to hang on to numeric designations because they don’t want to acknowledge the Obama name – similar to how I’m aware of some people who insist on using the “Calumet Expressway” name for Ill. 394 because they don’t want to acknowledge the “Bishop Ford Freeway” and the Rev. L.H. Ford whose cultural significance as international head of the Church of God in Christ apparently didn’t extend into the non-black parts of the South Side.

It is a large part of why I personally hate seeing roads renamed for anybody. The amount of stupid-talk that gets created is never worth the tribute, and it also has the effect of reducing the memory of anyone to nothing more than a future traffic jam or deadly accident.

 

BYRNE: She saw humor in her interchange

IN FACT, ABOUT the only renaming I ever wound up liking was the one that turned the Circle Interchange (just southwest of downtown where all the expressways converge) into the Jane Byrne Interchange, in honor of the first femme to become Chicago mayor.

It’s not that I think the Byrne Interchange moniker has all that special a ring to it.

But Byrne herself was still alive when the change was made, and I’ve heard stories about how much amusement she’d gain whenever she heard radio reports about traffic congestions that inevitably would include the line, “Jane Byrne is backed up.”

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Byrne joines Ryan, Ford as transport tributees -- will 'Looie" be next?

Put Jane Byrne on the list of people whom future generations of Chicagoans will regard as a mere road.


Forget the humanity that ever existed. People will forget the fact that Byrne was once mayor of Chicago, or that she was the first (and thus far, only) woman to hold that post.\


BECAUSE HOW MANY people do you really think remember that Dan Ryan, Jr., was once a Cook County Board president. Or that the Bishop L.H. Ford was once a significant leader of the Church of God in Christ?


Instead, we hear the daily traffic reports about how backed up traffic was on the "Ryan" for those people working their way into the heart of the city.


We even hear exotic reports about this "Ford Freeway" that always seems absurdly backed up headed north in the morning, and south in the evening -- but that many people living in the metropolitan area never go anywhere near.


Admittedly, Byrne's name will get more prominence because she's getting the Circle Interchange named after her. That's the point where all the expressways that head downtown converge.


IT'S THAT POINT where many motorists from all over Chicago and surrounding suburbs converge. It is a place with much potential for auto accidents of all sorts.


Which makes me wonder if we're destined to hear of so many people being killed or maimed at the Byrne Interchange that her name will take on an even more negative connotation now than it had for some people back when she was mayor and interfering with their efforts to push yet another concocted scheme through City Hall?


One significant difference; Byrne was still alive last week when ceremonies were held to mark the official renaming of the interchange.


Unlike Ryan and Ford, who had already passed on by the time the expressways that took their identities became a part of the daily commutes that occur in Chicago.


ALTHOUGH CONSIDERING HOW long it took for Byrne to get anything of significance named in her honor, I can't help but wonder if some political people were preferring that she be deceased before they had to get around to doing anything.


Even Harold Washington got his namesake tribute (a public library building) so many years ago that I wonder how many people are losing track of the man.


We now have Ryan, Ford and Byrne, to go along with former Governor and U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson and former presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy as the namesakes of Chicago's major expressways.


Ronald Reagan has his own expressway up in the far northwestern suburbs; which I suspect makes his ideologue backers happy. His road doesn't stretch into the city, because his political programs and ideas often ignored the concerns of urban America.


ALTHOUGH LOOKING AT the non presidential types who get a Chicago expressway, I can't help but notice some odd sense of balance -- although I believe it is unintentional.


A white Irish type in Ryan, an African-American preacher in Ford and a woman in Byrne. Does this mean we're going to someday need a Latino of sorts to provide another sense of balance?


Which makes me wonder if the day is going to come when we're going to get a significant road named for Rep. Luis Gutierrez? I'm not sure which road it will be. For all I know of the "Chicago Way," it's likely that someone will want to build a new road (and get rich off the awarding of the construction contracts) just so that the congressman's name will have a place to go.


And someday, the outspoken congressman will become nothing more than a place where winter icy conditions caused a series of fender-bender accidents.


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South suburbs have changed, and people should change their perception w/ it

It has been an intriguing six-day period for the suburban area south of Chicago.

QUINN: Is his talk cheap?



Gov. Pat Quinn has actually deemed the area that is an extension of Chicago’s great Sout’ Side worthy of his attention three times in the past few days.

ONCE WAS TO see that the old Dixie Square shopping center in Harvey was really being torn town, a second time in Hazel Crest to use a local school to announce a series of school-related projects the state would pay for, and a third time on Monday to be present for the unveiling of the new Tuskegee Airmen Memorial Trail signs that will be erected on Tuesday along the Cook County portion of I-57.

Quinn even seems to have some set rhetoric that he uses whenever he is in the municipalities that developed south of  95^th Street (or 119^th Street, or 138^th Street, whichever one you consider to be the southern “end” of Chicago) to make it sound like he cares about the area.

“If you put the south suburbs together, you would have one of the largest cities in America,” Quinn has said – which is sort of true. Depending on how one defines “south suburb” (as opposed to southwest suburb, west suburb, northwest or north suburb), the area can have about 500,000 people – which is almost the size of Milwaukee).

But, of course, nobody puts all those municipalities of 10,000 to 35,000 people each into one cohesive unit. Plus, the same fact could easily be said of the west suburbs or north suburbs.

THEY WOULD MAKE significant cities if they were considered as semi-entities, instead of individual communities -- certainly larger than anything found in "downstate" Illinois.

So I’m not convinced that the sudden surge of attention from Quinn and the state is going to change much of anything about the region – which I will admit I have a special interest in because I have lived there.

Much of my own life has been spent moving back and forth between city and suburb (with the occasional move outside the Chicago area to a politically-motivated community such as Springfield, Ill., or Washington, D.C.).

What makes the south suburbs stand out when it comes to suburbia is the fact that they truly are an off-shoot of Chicago’s South Side – which in recent decades developed neighborhoods that are almost entirely African-American.

SO DURING THE past decade when many of those African-American city residents became tired of city life and decided to move elsewhere, it may be true that some decided to go back “down South” (ie., Atlanta).

But many of those roughly 180,000 African-Americans who left Chicago in the past decade (according to the Census Bureau population count completed last year) are now living in those south suburbs.

Many communities in the south suburbs have developed majority African-American populations. The south suburbs is now just as important a region for black political empowerment as any Chicago South Side or West Side neighborhood.

Which is what causes many people to be scared off of taking the area seriously when it comes to economic development.

IT LEADS TO the very real conditions that Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., D-Ill., likes to talk about when he gives speeches. Invariably, he will talk about how the Bishop Ford Freeway is a messy traffic jam headed northbound during the morning rush hour, but that the southbound lanes are ever so empty.

Everybody feels the need to leave the southern area (and for that matter, the far South Side of Chicago proper) in order to gain any kind of significant employment.

Because of my own ties to the area, it is why I personally am rooting for people like Jackson whenever they talk about initiatives that might actually draw positive attention to the area (such as his plans to turn the area around 111^th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue into a national park honoring the old legacy of the Pullman railroad cars that once were built there).

Anybody who ever has been to that area would realize it still has such a historic feel to it that it could be an attraction – just as the few blocks surrounding what once was Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Ill., has become.

UNLESS PEOPLE LET their racial hang-ups get the best of them. That could be the biggest impediment to anything serious being done in the way of development for the area.

Will they become a tribute, or a barrier?



Which is why I am curious to see how the renaming of I-57 from 99^th Street down to Sauk Trail near suburban Matteson plays out in the public eye. Lots of people on Monday used ceremonies in suburban Markham to make grandiose statements. But will them mean them?

Or will there be a predominance of people who will take the fact that the one-time Calumet Expressway is now the Bishop Ford Freeway (named for long-time Church of God in Christ presiding bishop L.H. Ford) and that I-57 is now named for the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II fame and interpret that to mean that these two African-American tributes now establish eastern and western boundaries for black suburbia that they go out of their way to ignore?

If that were to happen, that would be the blow most likely to harm us as a society.

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