The 2009 Midway Review is out, but unfortunately not up on our website yet. Here's a photo of the cover for now, and a re-posting of my article on the aftermath of Chicago's Olympic bid:
NO LITTLE PLANS: CHICAGO’S NEXT OLYMPIC MARATHON WILL BE REVITALIZING THE SOUTH SIDE
I.
It was humid, the first Tuesday of July, and President Zimmer was sharing his lunch break with a bullhorn and a crowd of protesters.
A handful of South Side residents, University of Chicago students, and representatives from the Illinois Single-Payer were marching against the closing of a University of Chicago Medical Center Clinic on 47th St. The protest, led by South Side Together Organizing for Power on the corner of 58th and Ellis Ave, was typical: The marchers chanted, "health care is a human right!” and circled the Administration Building while University employees darted in and out of the front entrance.
But one set of small, black and white posters carried a slightly different message: “Better clinics—No Olympics Games.” This slogan became incorporated into another chant as the group continued to pace along the street.
The protest was primarily about criticizing the Medical Center for disregarding poor people—this much was clear. But less obviously, it also implicated the city's Olympic bid—and the bid's potential cost for taxpayers—as a big part of the problem of Chicago’s health care disparities.
The protestors won’t be using this argument anymore; Chicago lost the Olympic bid last month with a surprisingly low number of votes from the International Olympic Committee, and the city has not indicated that it will pursue another after garnering last place against Madrid, Rio de Janeiro (the winner) and Tokyo.
But for those who opposed the Olympic bid this summer, the Games became a proxy for all of Chicago’s public works ills: the failing school system, the broken transit model, gang violence, health care disparities. The colorful Chicago 2016 banners adorning Washington Park loomed over these South Side community issues leading up to the Oct. 2 bid decision, and continued to hang somberly for sometime after the city’s loss, begging the questions, When will the park district take them down? And What will the city do next in this beautiful park, and the dismally low-income neighborhoods at its borders?
In Chicago’s failed quest for the Olympic bid (a loss Mayor Daley blames partly on “dart-throwing” nay-sayers), the opponents asked, “how can we fund an Olympics when our public schools are failing? How can we send thousands upon thousands of tourists into South Side communities that we’re afraid to enter ourselves?” while supporters championed the injection of private money into the veins of the city’s transit map and business corridors. With the Games behind them, I want to see these two groups come together, because they have a lot in common. Both want Chicago to prosper and be worthy of global acclaim, and both understand that this won’t happen until we reverse the trends of heightened gun violence, failed schools, crowded clinics that unfortunately under girded the city’s aspirations.
II.
For Tom Tresser, the No Games Chicago member who brought the "Better Clinics..." posters to the July 2 protest, the issue of poor medical services and the 2016 Olympics were inextricable.
Tresser has been a community activist and “angry tax-payer” for the past decade, first as the founder of Protect our Parks, and now with No Games. When he learned of the city’s plans to place major Olympics venues in public parks, he said his background fighting for public land compelled him to get involved in the anti-Games efforts.
"We have the same goals," he said of his organization and the amalgam of South Side and healthcare activists and Hyde Park residents gathering outside of the University bookstore. "We're trying to make the city better from a grassroots level, and one of the things [No Games] has been saying all along is that we want better trains, better schools, better clinics—and not the Games."
But if you ask many disappointed supporters of the city’s bid, the Olympic Games would have been exactly the financial stimulus to make those improvements—and revitalize the South Side communities that have historically been forsaken by public programs in particular—far more than Chicago could have on its own.
In fact, without the promise of international tourism, private donations, and the millions of dollars in federal spending to improve the city’s security and transit systems past Olympics host cities received, Chicago seems to be back at the starting line, with little more than a bruised ego to show of it, or so one would think. But it is wrong to assume that the Olympics would necessarily have brought to the city, along with inspiration and global notoriety, the impetus for sweeping social improvements. One obvious reason is that the money raised to fund and insure Chicago’s bid came from a different pool—one of private businesses, zealous citizens, and friends of Mayor Daley—than the money that the University of Chicago Medical Center or the Chicago Transit Authority are likely to receive.
But the Olympics have already forced Chicagoans to see the South Side in a different light, even as the IOC plots the path of the Olympic torch through Rio de Janeiro. Indeed, as disappointed or celebratory as we may be over the outcome, we must not forget that Chicago’s near South Side exists; it is a cluster of low-income, high-crime neighborhoods surrounding one of the city’s largest greenscapes, a gorgeous park designed by urban planning legend Fredrick Law Olmsted, and caught in a century-long economic decline. If citizens on both sides of the bid are serious about making Chicago an even safer and more prosperous place to live, and a hot-spot for international tourism, they won’t take down their 2016 banners or protest fliers, but remember what they stand for—and what communities they effected most.
III.
Take Washington Park, the small neighborhood of roughly 13,000 residents and a median household income of $15,000 according to the U.S. census, located just west of the proposed sites of the Olympic Stadium and Aquatic Center.
If you talk to Brandon Johnson, his neighborhood has forgotten how beautiful it is. With its 372 acres of park land and 20 minute train ride from the Loop, it’s little surprise to community leaders like Johnson, executive director of the Washington Park Consortium, that the neighborhood attracted international attention as the proposed site of the 2016 Olympic stadium in Chicago’s bid.
“Now that we’re getting attention from some famous people,” Johnson said in an interview in June, “the neighborhood is remembering it’s attractive again.” Johnson was not just talking about members of the IOC. He expected Mayor Daley and other North Side-dwellers to recognize Washington Park’s potential as more than a blighted neighborhood; more than a wilderness dotted with vacant lots dividing Hyde Park and the El Trains.
True, the bid committee had serious improvement plans for Washington Park tied to the Olympic bid, including an 80,000-seat stadium, that now must be discarded. And the city would probably have pumped thousands of public dollars into a redevelopment of 55th street between State St. and Cottage Grove, the thoroughfare that thousands of spectators would have taken on their way to the stadium.
But Washington Park has plans of its own, drawn up over the summer by community activists and Alderman Willie Cochran’s office, and dubbed the Quality of Life Plan. This proposal details on how community members want to see their home develop over the next decade, and was created in partnership with the non-profit community development organization Local Initiatives Support Coalition (LISC) and a steering committee of neighborhood volunteers that began brainstorming back in the late 1990s. It was quietly unveiled last May, while debates over how the Olympics would be funded began heating up in City Hall.
The plan has little to say about the spectacle of the Olympics, besides expressing hope that the Games would bring skilled jobs and visibility to the community. Instead, it stresses after-school programming for neighborhood youth, bringing businesses to Washington Park’s main streets, and planting community vegetable gardens in now- empty lots.
If Chicago’s businessmen, cultural leaders and Mayor Daley can get behind vegetable gardens the way they got behind gymnastics, the Olympics may yet leave a legacy in Washington Park. And Woodlawn, Bronzeville, South Chicago, Grand Crossing—not to mention other pockets of urban poverty that were counting on the Olympics to remind Chicago that it has more to offer than the glistening Lake and bustling Loop.
They asked for affordable housing in Woodlawn and Bronzeville, where gentrification slowly threatens to push poor people out of their homes; more-widely accessible transportation to connect the city’s north and south; stronger clinics to support residents who can’t afford primary care. We couldn’t bring the Games to Chicago for all our banners or the support of President Obama, but this city has an Olympic-sized task ahead of itself still. Community revitalization is more of a marathon than the sprint and stumble Chicago took toward Oct. 2, but I don’t think there is anyone in this city who wouldn’t benefit if Chicago actively played that game, starting with the near west and south sides.
The bid committee often invoked a famous phrase, uttered by Chicago’s urban-planning legend Daniel Burnham, to demonstrate that Olympian aspirations were in the city’s history: “Make no little plans…make big plans, aim high in hope and work.” Why shouldn’t this advice still ring true?
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