Jack Markowski & Pat Sharkey - Transcript

Jack Markowski and Pat Sharkey Transcript
Interviewee: Jack Markowski and Pat Sharkey
Interviewers: Bob Remer and Mark Hallett
Transcriber: Mark Hallett and Dorothy Nygren
Place: Edgewater Library
Date: February 9, 2019
Time: 1:07:20

Copyright © 2019 Edgewater Historical Society

BR: This is Bob Remer with Mark Allen from the Edgewater Historical Society Interviewing Jack Markowski and Pat Sharkey at the Edgewater library on February 9, 2019. Jack and Pat are recipients of the Living Treasures award and we want to congratulate you and welcome you to the Living Treasure class group. And we’re certainly honored that you’ve been serving Edgewater all these years. We have a number of standard questions we’d like you both to address. Each of you have made contributions and accomplishments in Edgewater both being honored or separately. The first general questions are, which I like you both to address is first, when did you come to Edgewater and why? What encouraged you to become involved in community work in Edgewater. Three, in your opinion, what remains to be done and for what advice might you give young people about the value of community engagement? This of course would revolve around specific work and then we can start with Jack and Jack. Guy, I know you from the day you were hired.

JM: Yes. You hired me, you were the President of the [Edgewater Community] Council.

RR: Why were you hired and what brought you here from Washington or Oregon?

JM: Well, in Oregon, but in Lincoln Park at the time… Let me go back a little bit. So Pat and I, met as undergraduates at the University of Chicago and lived in Hyde Park and South Shore and we had actually done community organizing in South Shore working with food co ops primarily. After a few years of that, we decided we wanted to go to graduate school and ended up both going out west to Oregon. And Pat went to law school and Environmental Law. And I started in architecture and then ended up in urban and regional planning and I got a master’s degree in that. So when we finished, this was around 1980 when we finished, we came back to Chicago. Pat came back first. She was finished and got a job with the Illinois Pollution Control Board in environmental law. And so I followed back to Chicago.

(02:35)

She had found a place in Lincoln Park. So I came back and frankly didn’t come for any highminded reason to start with. I was, I was, had my master’s degree in urban and regional planning and I wanted to, uh, work as a planner in, in city planning and it was funny, I had trouble with my masters coming from Oregon with my master’s degree and with my community organizing experience in South Shore. I was having trouble getting any traction, frankly in finding what I regarded as a good job in Chicago. And lo and behold, one of our friends told us, well, this Edgewater Community Council has this program. They’re trying to turn around Winthrop and Kenmore and they’re looking for somebody for what you call the program and planning director at the time.

(03:32)

And I originally interviewed for that job as a matter of fact, and I wasn’t chosen for that job. But the way I think about it, you guys, you hired a program and planning director, but then you thought, we actually have to get somebody to do the work here. I was hired initially by you, Bob and Ed Marciniak and the leadership of the Edgewater Community Council, who had put together this Operation Winthrop Kenmore, who had a focus on revitalizing Winthrop and Kenmore because that backbone, that spine was the key to Edgewater. It was going to unite the community, east and west and so forth. At any rate, from my perspective, I was getting hired. I was a guy looking for a job and what I felt was, all right, nobody knew me in Chicago at the time anymore and I thought, this is going to give me something.

It’s going to give me a track record? I’m going to come in here. What these folks want me to do is to survey the housing conditions, find out who owns thing, analyze the problems, develop a plan. So I figured, okay, I’m going to do this 6 to 12 months. I’m going to work on this. It’ll give me a portfolio of something and I’ll move from there. And that’s what I started to do. My principal goal at the time was to get that piece of portfolio there and get a little track record and start to know people in Chicago.

(04:44)

PS: One of the things that Jack hasn’t mentioned, if I might interrupt that’s for a moment, is that, between undergraduate and going on to University of Oregon for his planning degree, both of us worked in South Shore for the South Shore Commission. Jack was the housing director of the South Shore Commission before going to planning school. So we did have some background in housing in Chicago…

JM: Oh I had background. It just wasn’t being appreciated.

PS: …and I worked actually running liquor referendum in thirty-three precincts in South Shore. Just as background preparation for up here. Right. Our good friend Bob Kiwi , who remains one of our dearest friends in life, was the director of the South Shore Commission at that time.

(5:34)

JM: Okay. So at any rate in 1981 I come back and Mr. Reemer and Mr. Marciniak interviewed me over at the Waffle House.

RR: Awful Waffle…

JM: Awful Waffle. And after a while a Walgreens. That’s right. Yeah. One thing led to another and the, and so that’s how I landed here. That’s how I landed here and then because we tend to be committed to the cause, I ended up not just doing the survey and so forth, but we ended up moving in. We were happy for about a year to live in Lincoln Park when we came back to Chicago. But then we moved into Edgewater. That must have been 1982.

PS: We liked Edgewater much better.

(06:14)

JM: We always point out that we lived in the 5600 block of Kenmore and when people don’t understand, about our first home…

PS: Our first home in Edgewater.

JM: Our first home in Edgewater is that Edgewater was closer to the loop from where we were living in the 2600 block of Lakewood in Lincoln Park. Because it would take forever to get across to the Lakefront in Lincoln Park. So you’re right at the lake front [in Edgewater] and it’s 10 minutes to the loop.

PS: When you did get there [Lincoln Park lakefront] it was so crowded that you just didn’t enjoy a sense of being out in the open space, the open park and an everyday experience of the lake that we have here in Edgewater.

JM: So integrated… That’s how we landed here initially. And for me, I just wanted a job and I was planning to be able to get my roots down and start showing what I could do.

RR: And you were living right there on Kenmore, right in the middle.

JM: Yeah. Yeah.

RR: Tell us about that first grant the Edgewater [Community Council] got and the significance of it. I think your role is so important in making that a success. Wasn’t that a model that delegated planning?

(07:38)

JM: So we were called within the city. The city had these designated areas, neighborhood strategy areas. We were designated a neighborhood strategy area and that was from Foster to Devon on Winthrop and Kenmore basically. So there were 24 blocks, a very focused area. And I think one of the very cool things about what Edgewater Community Council was doing, what Bob was doing. He was the president. Ed Marcinak was like our free a godfather mentor consultant who, I think, had significant positions with the city and helped us a lot with relations with the city. But I think together what they were doing was putting the Edgewater Community Council in a position of not just being an all purpose community organization, which I think are important, but which end up being a forum where people in the community could come together and express their needs and complaints and maybe come together and take positions on things.

(08:41)

But this was actually identifying a task, a goal, an issue, and saying we’re going to organize the community around this one thing that is the most important thing to our future. And even I’d say the title, when they were hiring somebody, they weren’t hiring an executive director, they were hiring something called a Program and Planning Director. And I say that because for me, the one thing, the luxury that I had working there, was all I had to do was focus on this program on making things better on Winthrop and Kenmore, which was a luxury.I was not involved in fundraising, in membership in the various kinds of elections at the board and so forth. I just was able to focus on doing this and for the city too. So it turns out, you know, we had a lot of forces that were lined up right for us. I mentioned Bob and Ed Marciniak. With the guys we had: that was great.

PS: Jake Pomerantz

JM: Yeah, it was great leadership throughout. Jake Pomerantz, his wife, Linda Brodsky. On the board, Marion Volini had been a board president and she was Alderman at the time. When I came there, people such as Kathy Osterman, Rick Toman, all these folks were coming up through the Edgewater Community Council. It was the place where community activists who wanted a vehicle through which they could work to make the community better if they could do it. And all of them were working in their different areas but supporting each other. But at any rate, so for me, working on Winthrop and Kenmore… what they said to me was figure out what’s going on, then work with us to develop a plan.

(10:37)

JM: And we did that. We looked at it. There was, I remember 95% rental housing. 65% of the buildings were in either four plus ones or what we called the common corridor buildings, predominantly studio apartments. It ended up being a quite a transient area. There were at the time, I think more than 20 vacant buildings and 20 vacant lots. It had been called “Arson Alley” or “The Corridor.” It was interesting because as a community organizing effort, it was not really about not as much organizing the residents there because they said it was 95% rental. We worked with the residents, but what was really key where the people who owned all those buildings on Winthrop in Kenmore. And so I think it was quite unique that we had an organizing effort that did include residents but also included… was directed primarily at the owners of the buildings there.

(11:26)

JM: It was directed at the owners of the buildings there. And we ended up then being able to focus on simply making… oh, I was saying how everything in the line of forces lined up. We were right on the lake front. We’re right at the end of the [Outer] Drive within great access to downtown. We had Loyola’s support and encouragement and financial support at the north end. All of those forces plus all the leadership locally and energy; all those things were lining up. So we were in quite good shape and it was interesting. It was something that could unite the east and the west of the community. We were able to get support for the program from the Condo Associations on Sheridan Road. Oh, we got it. But at the same time we got support from the block clubs west of Broadway. All of them supported the effort.

(12:22)

PS: Jack, I don’t know if you’ve talked to Jack really about what the conditions for Winthrop and Kenmore at that time that was driving all of this?

JM: Well it was called “Arson Alley.” There were the vacant buildings. There were gangs on the streets there. And slum landlords. So we had a program that ended up being an aggressive program. First of all, one of the things I found there were only 300 buildings in the area. And we didn’t have computers then, but we had a little file box with an index file of every building owner and how many units. One of the first things I did was, within about a month or two, I called for the volunteers and everybody went out and surveyed a block or two.

(13:04)

And after that I knew more about the area than anybody else because I actually had an index file of 300 cards. And so from that point forward, we knew every building, every owner, all the conditions. And we followed them. We went to the building owners and basically said, “We’re going to turn this area around and you’re with us or you’re against us. If you’re with us, we’re going to work with you. We’re going to get special patrols from the police, we’re going to help you market the area, we’re going to try to get you financing to rehab your buildings. We’re going to promote the whole area. And if you’re not with us, if you’re not with the program, we’ll see you in housing court.” And we hired lawyers and intervened in court and basically aggressively attacked the slum landlords. The idea was get them out and get some new guys in and support the new guys quickly.

(14:00)

MH: I have a quick question. As someone who has now lived in the neighborhood for about 20 years and I know sort of the global diversity you’re taking about. But I don’t know sort of racially or ethnically what the neighborhood that you were working in was like at that time.

JM: It had been, there had been significant racial change. It was in the 80s, beginning of the 80s, so I’d say through the 70s, probably starting in the 60s. And I think, significant. There were pockets too. There were a lot of things, so many stages [of development] in that area. When you look in the area you see these classic old buildings ranging from a single family home to three flats, two flats, three flats, six flats.

(14:48)

That’s the luxury old housing that the area was initially built up with. It’s so interesting when you look at the area. Then there were the common corridor buildings, which were when they were first built, we called them common corridor buildings. Many times today they call them SRO [ single room occupancy] buildings, but they were the five to eight story buildings, studio apartments. They were first marketed for young working people in the 1920s. I think particularly it was when women were coming into the workforce, but they would have things like that when the “L” line was built up here [in Edgewater] now. Now we had the “L” was extended up to Edgewater and those common corridor buildings, I think they represented like the young singles getting out of the home and getting into the workforce. And they had things like cool things like switchboards and linen service and elevators.

(15:40)

And then Bryn Mawr would be a hot spot, you know, an entertainment district for instance. So that was all kind of a happening area here. I’m told maybe, the Edgewater Beach Apartments where there for people like the outside baseball teams coming into town would stay at the Edgewater Beach Hotel and come to the clubs on Bryn Mawr. But it had deteriorated quite a bit since then. And in fact, one thing I left out was the 60s saw the building of these four plus ones and those also had primarily had one bedroom apartments. But you have to imagine what they displaced was one to six unit buildings. And I think when the four plus ones came; it fundamentally kind of altered the balance. So that rather than having one to six unit luxury buildings, with these studio apartments in, now you had the studio apartments and you had the four plus ones, both of which were renting to a much lower demographic.

And the balance was thrown off quite a bit. So at any rate, that was the challenge. And I think that going as with the corridors so to speak, which we struck that word from our vocabulary, going south of Foster into Uptown, Uptown had even met much more transiency and use of these studio apartment buildings. One of the positions that ECC ended up taking at some point is we actually put a moratorium on the use of these common corridor buildings for special needs or for social services. We declared a moratorium and then we tried to enforce it, which we did effectively. But the point was this, it’s not that we were against the social services, but it’s that every time you turned around the market demand for a common corridor building was so weak. Every time you turned around, here’s an early release program for prisoners. Oops, they’re opening up one on Winthrop and Kenmore. Here’s a detox center. Whoops, that’s opened up. Here’s a home for battered women up on Winthrop and Kenmore.

(18:00)

PS: There was a moment, I remember speaking of that, remember when Jim Thompson was governor and he basically took the money away from the institutionalization of mentally ill people. And so what they had there were halfway houses that were jumping into any community that would allow it. And you know, Winthrop, the Kenmore and Uptown of course became the place where all of these were being sited.

JM: That’s right. These little studio apartment buildings overnight became unlicensed nursing homes and so forth.

(18:41)

RR: And those landlords, because there was a lot of flexibility there, they became beholden to the machine to overlook a lot of the problems. And that was a source of funding and votes for the corrupt machine that was in place at the time. You talked about Uptown. One of the big efforts at the time was that we were considered part of Uptown. Part of this planning was to bring back the identity of Edgewater, which historically had preceded right down by about a hundred years anyway, or 75 years or whatever it was. So I wonder if you can talk about how that was.

(19:31)

JM: Well that’s interesting because that preceded me. I think the 1980 census was the first census that Edgewater. When you see the maps, Chicago has 77 community areas and community area number 77 is Edgewater. And you think, well that’s weird. Why is Rogers Park number one what some of Westbridge number two and Uptown’s number three and you go around the city and so forth yet and 77 is Edgewater? Well, it’s because it wasn’t officially until 1980. Before it was considered part of Uptown. And so it was interesting that in itself, this labeling, this image building and unfortunately, I mean for Uptown… I talked about The Corridor having lots of negative associations but Uptown it also had in a lot of ways a lot of negative associations and we were trying, the people in Edgewater, were saying, “Actually we always have been a separate community. It was just the ignorance of the demographer from the University of Chicago in the 1930s who did the official city map. They just didn’t understand that this was a special, a separate area.” But the argument was persuasive.

(21:09)

RR: Yes. What’s been successful, I think, in Edgewater, it was that sense of identity. They had a project where you could go in and say, “I live in Edgewater or I live in Avalon.” And they would give you a map and you would just trace on the map what you thought the boundaries of your community were – Uptown, whatever. And then when it was all done, thousands of people put in from different communities. They then released what these maps were. I mean with the overlay, everybody’s outlined. When the Edgewater map came back, it was unbelievable. It was like 95% of the people got the thing right. But when you look at all the neighborhoods in the city, one neighborhood had the most accurate description by “self described” was Edgewater.

JM: That’s amazing.

RR: I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Oh my God.”

JM: Because I think one of our things is always our relationship with Andersonville of course.

(22:04)

RR: Well Andersonville is a neighborhood within the community area of Edgewater, one of fifteen neighborhoods.

JM: Except that it spills over two blocks into Uptown.

RR: Like an appendix. [Everyone chuckles.]

MH: Okay. So you were about to ask a question when we were talking.

RR: Yes, Community Area 77 and how it developed and how you think it was important?

(22:40)

JM: Well the process. Yeah. The beginning… In 1980 Edgewater was officially recognized as Community Area number 77 because of arguments and evidence presented by the community. And it’s very interesting to just think of that. It’s absolutely true as the foundation for community development here; we had a fresh name, a fresh Edgewater. We weren’t part of Uptown, we weren’t the Winthrop/Kenmore corridor. Or Arson Alley. We are Edgewater. And it was really nice because you had in a sense,… I felt a blank slate that now you could build on that and you could build the image. So much of what are you going to make this into and what are people going to think about this and so forth. So much we know is then the image begets reality. But I think particularly in city neighborhoods By the way, I would say that I learned that in working on Winthrop and Kenmore, that so much of what is image begets reality.

(23:36)

Every building owner has an attitude towards his or her building. They get it in large part from what they think the other building owners are doing. And if they think this is a community that you actually have to screen your tenants, take care of your building, provide good services, maintain the building and you invest in it, rehab it. Over time you get good rents, you get good tenants and you can appreciate your property. Or your opinion could be, man, this neighborhood is terrible. I can’t get any good tenants. You can’t spend any money on the building. You got to take what you can get today and be very careful about investing for tomorrow. That’s all image perception and attitude. And so I think that whole name, Edgewater, we tried to create a context for positive investment in a positive ownership of buildings.

(23:40)

PS: It reminds me of the no graffiti, no tolerance issue that’s become more controversial now. But in that era, and in living in a neighborhood like we were, you really realize that when gang graffiti went up, you had to get it down right away, right? Because otherwise it wasn’t just the gang. So when it [the graffiti build up] did, it was a perception that that started to build.

JM: The perceptions extended, for instance, to the police department. There’s so much controversy today about the police, how they treat the minority communities and relations. Here’s the different thing. When somebody such as ourselves, Pat and I, lived on the 5600 block of Kenmore… I’ll tell you there was noise, gangs, those were kind of problems near us. So we would call [the building owner]. There was a four plus one next door to us and they would be having noise in the middle of the night. I’d call the building owner who actually was an owner occupant in a building. Surprise! “Why are you calling me?” I’m saying, “I’m awake and if I’m awake, you should be awake.” Your tenants are waking me up and I can’t sleep because of the raucous party going on there.” Noise in itself is funny in that it would be such an issue. And that doesn’t sound like a big deal. Doesn’t sound like guns or anything, but it in itself is a quality of life issue. It can be very severe. But anyway, the funny thing is, I remember on that particular occasion we called the police. You remember… a man and a woman police officer ended up standing in our bedroom where we were in our pajamas…

(26:13)

PS: Our pajamas. We wanted to show the windows You look out to the air shaft on to the little apartment across the way. Show them what it felt like it. Thump, thump, thump. Coming from the little apartment across from us.

JM: Show them what it felt like. But their question to us was, “Why do you live here?” And we said, “Wait a minute, whoa. Why do we live here? We do live here.” Then it became a whole question about setting the standards? Whose community was this? What standards were in effect.? And that was a big deal. I remember, one of the most successful organizing things… we did was a crime watch in the area too. One of the most successful organizing things. I ran this petition drive. East Edgewater United. What it was saying was, “We are residents. We don’t like loitering. We don’t like drug dealing. We don’t like noise and prostitution. We don’t like gangs. We don’t like… The way the police differentially enforced the law. They would say, ‘Oh no, no, no. That is what they do.”

(27:31)

That’s what they do in that neighborhood. I remember a lot of people at the time were accusing me, saying, “Oh this is very racist what you’re doing here. You don’t appreciate racial minorities or something.” And I’d say, “You’re crazy. You’re a racist. Because in fact if you think racial minorities want prostitution and drug dealing and people hanging out into the gangs. They don’t want that.” And in fact, it was the most successful thing we had done in terms of recruiting minority participation who were standing behind this. I just remember we had a police commander at the time, Commander Potemkin, and he was totally freaked out by this. And I remember we had a rally in some church and, and he comes to the church in his full regalia. He was fully dressed and he was trying to intimidate us with his uniform. But he was so upset that we were going to be telling him. We were saying, “We are telling you what the standards are and you’re not going to tell us why do you live there? We do live here for something.” Right. That was fun.

(28:40)

RR: In fact, that was the concept of community policing, which got a big start here. And there were people who were in the citywide effort in community policing, Reggie Griffin, who went on to become involved with leadership citywide. Yes. Yes. It started right here.

(29:08)

PS: Yeah. So Bob, what I’m remembering from that era too in this is that we lived on Winthrop, Kenmore near Bryn Mawr and a big old three flat that we’d bought with some friends. What I’m remembering is the block club that we formed. You were a part of it. You were down the street and there were a number of other people. That area didn’t really have a block club. And we had come out of South Shore and Hyde Park. We had been part of block clubs and trying to help people realize the importance of block club stuff. Edgewater, which had block clubs surely at that time too. But that one area, east of Broadway didn’t, What was the name - Winthrop Kenmore Neighbors?

I think we called it that at that time. And Jack Callahan and other people who were sort of forces - the Palmerantz’ and Linda Brodsky lived just down the street. They were people who were coming together. Of course, the Travlos’ lived right down the street from us. So important on Bryn Mawr. But one the nucleus of some of the problems were those single room occupancy hotels. What they were fabulous old hotels that had become long term residences for people who had a really very low incomes. Those were a nexus on Bryn Mawr at that time too. And in our block club there was always tension about this issue or about low income people. I think Jack’s response is absolutely right, that nobody wants to live in a neighborhood full of litter and crime and where people are being mugged.

(30:54)

What we had with one of those halfway houses across from the Bryn Mawr Hotel was mentally ill people walking on the streets. It was just sad. They were just out on the street endlessly all day walking the streets and they’d get accused of crimes and they’d get involved in weird situations. For us, another one of the initial block club experiences in Edgewater was working with some of our neighbors to try to put together a block club to deal with those issues and again, having that same reaction from the police about our block club.

(31:30)

RR: Well, in terms of how many people live here anyway. Some of the stabilizing influence that happened was that ECC agreed to support subsidized housing, which technically violated some of the biggest concerns about institutional development; the Q 11 Rehab Project, which was approximately 20 buildings.

JM: It was 18 buildings and 500 units in parts of Edgewater.

RR: It was controversial to a lot of people iin Edgewater and they thought that we had gone to the dark side side of the political spectrum and that we’d gone way too far.

JM: Well, it was a hundred percent Section 8.

RR: And so it was one of the things I had to work very hard to develop relationships with other community organizations. Some people thought that was heresy to align ourselves with the Organization of the Northeast (ONE) for example, which has now gone in a different direction, Organization of the Northside.

(32:41)

But I thought this will work out and we’re going to get, we’re going to get some momentum showing real rehab. And getting back to the point I want to make, one of the conditions with oversight of the project and we had some very strict oversight was to how the tenant community can overview the operations. And I remember going to these meetings as well. I’m sorry, you go to these meetings and the people who were toughest on issues of lifestyle, noise and bad tenants, were the tenants. They were harder on other tenants than the neighbors were. And it just goes to prove your point. Just because you’re a minority doesn’t mean you want noise and drugs. But that oversight was a very important vehicle. And you probably worked with them.

(35:57)

JM: But what you were reminding me of, this was in the days, which Bob was saying, when there was early 80s project based Section 8 gut rehabs, financed by the federal government beginning, middle and end and privately owned. But everybody would get a rental certificate, section eight rental certificate. And I know myself at the time I was very concerned that there were two phases, 500 units of housing, 18 buildings. It’s going to be a… whoa, do we sell our future here or something or what? How were these buildings going to be managed for the long term? You know they were going to start out beautiful upfront. Among the conditions, we also got them to agree to a number of things. I think half of the buildings ended up being vacant buildings that we pointed out to them.

(32:44)

So they had to agree to take particular problem buildings that we pointed out. They took our worst buildings. They also worked with us. They hired a local resident Sheri Krantz actually. We worked with them to develop a marketing plan so that it wasn’t a 100% segregated development. So that from the beginning it ended up with a racial mix of people in the development. They actually paid for a community person to do marketing to implement that. Then, as Bob said, the ongoing oversight. The other thing I learned is it is so important in community development for people to simply see the shovels, the bricks and mortar, the progress, the new windows, the construction work going on. Ed Marciniak would always say that. He says, “Don’t ask so many questions. It’s the work itself that people see and that inspires the people across the street to invest in their buildings as well.” That was also true.

(35:47)

RR: Yeah. One of the things was fortunately we had a change in political leadership. A public official was extorting money from developers to get building permits to the tune of $5,000 per year. I mean, you agreed. It was this kind of environment you were walking into it. We had to change those perceptions.

(36:20)

RR: Now Pat, you’re partners in community organization and getting active in community projects. And I didn’t realize about how the two of you worked organizing on the South Side. You got very involved working with your own block club. Can you tell us about those projects you were working on?

PS: Yeah, and I think there is an interesting segue here. Okay. After living on Kenmore near Bryn Mawr for five years, we had our first daughter while we were living there. And when she was about two, we bought a house on Lakewood, 6200 block. So we’re just up from Granville and we loved it - a great place to raise kids. We’ve got a little back yard and stuff like that. But we were very drawn to the fact that we continued to be involved in community affairs. I think Jack was still working for the Edgewater Community Council. And so we were getting our first taste of being on the west side of Broadway. which was always a big dividing line. You were a bit of a traitor if you moved over to the west side [of Broadway].

JM: If somebody was stumbling down the alley, six police cars would come and check out what’s going on. And nobody would say, “Why are you here?” Yeah.

(37:50)

PS: Well, since Jake and Linda had moved over to Balmoral, we felt a little license, Bob was still at Kenmore. We planned to have another baby. And so we thought this is the time to do it, but we remained really interested [in community work] of course, because Jack was still at ECC. It was so vibrant in those days, with the issues generally of our commercial district, Granville, that commercial district between the Broadway area and over to the lake. It was really kind of down and out commercial district in that era. This is 1986, I believe, we bought our house.

So, we ended up, of course, being involved in the block club there, which Annette Schroeder had been maybe the founder of, and a former ECC President; somebody who I think had been a mentor and colleague of Jack’s, and on the Edgewater Community Council or many years. That really encouraged us to get involved in the block club. And we did. Among the things that we were dealing with at that time, was right where the mosque [Ismali Center] is now was a nightclub at that time. It had a two or three o’clock, four o’clock license, I remember.

RR: Zanzibar

PS: Zanzibar. Thank you. It was a real disco kind of nightclub in that eighties period. We were sleeping in our bedroom. I always tell the stories from the bedroom. In our bay window out onto the street and hear that thumping music and looking down at four in the morning when the drunks were pouring out onto the street. They would park over on our street to go over there. They’d be peeing in our yard and breaking their bottles of liquor and stuff all over the yard. So that was another impetus for us just to be more involved in the block club. So I was involved with the block club for quite a while and before becoming president, I was involved with these issues on Granville and particularly around those liquor stores that we ended up running the liquor referendum on.

(40:08)

That’s a part of the story that I want to tell is how this came out of block clubs. By that time there were maybe some strong block clubs. Edgewater Glen of course. We had a strong block club of Edgewater, Near North Neighbors that Annette [Schroeder] had had formed between Granville and Devon – a strong block club. I always get this wrong – EDNA? What is the name of the Edgewater north? I get it wrong, but the block club is on the east side of Broadway over to Sheridan Road. And I think it goes to Thorndale, EDNA maybe. In any event, those folks, we were working with the Alderman over a problem of two liquor stores that were right across from each other, and the view was that they were a nexus of drug dealing and prostitution. They were the nexus of it; somehow they were the nexus of it. It had been going on for years before we got there.

(41:26)

RR: Can you tell us what year it was that you initiated this?

JM: And don’t forget our youngest was going to Sacred Heart. You were walking down Granville with her to Sacred Heart. And I think you saw this every day, right?

PS: Yeah. We could see it every day. So, the real liquor referendum started in 2003 but I think it’s important to understand the background of what was going on because for a long time we were working with, Mary Ann Smith, who was the Alderman at the time at the 48th ward. But the line for the ward, it went down Granville. And so Joe Moore was the Alderman on the north side. We’re working with both Mary Ann and with Joe on the issues of what was going on with this drug situation. But, really it’s important to understand that was going on a long time. Operation Winthrop/Kenmore, not withstanding, this commercial strip was known throughout the city. I mean, one of the things we learned from the police is that they would pick up “johns” who would come to Winthrop and Granville to pick up prostitutes who were from the suburbs.

They often had suburban licenses [on their cars]. We were renowned as an area for prostitutes and drugs sitting right next to Loyola. And I remember Loyola’s south campus hadn’t grown over to Granville yet. In fact, we were involved. Our block club and later the Granville task force kind of encouraged Loyola to create, to really designate a south campus and really begin to take ownership of this area such that they would help us with defeating some of the crime activity on Granville. I always have to tell this little story. I remember talking to Father Garenzini at the time and telling him, “While we’re running liquor referendum, why don’t we put up some banners on the street that say ‘Loyola South Campus’ to begin to take ownership of this street?”

(43:30)

And we were talking about image and he said to me, “Pat, I’ll do anything for you, but I’m not putting a banner up and having the prospect of a photo being taken underneath a Loyola banner with a prostitute.” In other words, it was a chicken and the egg problem that had been there for a long time. And how were we going to solve it? I remember it. So we went, block club leaders went with our Alderman to visit each of the liquor store owners and they just pointed to each other constantly as the problem. And segue to what Jack was saying about how people and owners perceive the neighborhood being, how they run their property. The Mashnes who owned the worst of the two liquor stores.

Sam would just say to us, “I’m sorry, it’s the neighborhood. It’s not us. You live in a slum. This is who your neighborhood is.” Can imagine this guy? He lived in the suburbs, by the way. He’d come in every day. And he’d open up, pulled back his metal gates from his horrible little liquor store on the corner. All he saw around him were the drunks lying on the street that I’d have to walk over when I’m walking my daughter to school, and the prostitutes. His view of the neighborhood was, “That’s the neighborhood.” He didn’t see his role in it. So we worked with the Alderman on both sides of the street. These guys [the owners] would tell us they would get rid of little bottles, won’t sell the little bottles. “We won’t sell the heavy duty malt liquors. We won’t,” But we’d walk in there. I remember walking with Joe Moore one day into Mashnes [Liquor store] and there was exactly the stuff that he [the owner] had promised us two weeks ago that he wasn’t going to sell. And he’d say, “Well, that guy’s selling it.”

(45:20)

PS: So eventually we said, “We’ve got to run the liquor rat friend out,” I’m not one of the people who originally said, “We’ve got to do this.” But I really credit Mary Ann [Smith] and I credit Barb Stanley who was the president of the Edgewater Community Council at that time. I credit Mike Volini, who was our committeeman at that time. Everybody was working together to recognize the problem. We had an issue. We had two precincts and we wanted to run it as one precinct. So we redrew the lines of the precinct. When it came time, we could redraw the lines of those precincts. We realized that we had the ability and the ward lines changed. And we had to change the 49th. When we saw that happening, we said, “This is the time to do it.” And so we put people out in the street, we organized. We probably had 50 people who were going out onto the street and they were from the block clubs. They were from the EDNA block club we were talking about. They were from the EGA -Edgewater Glen block club. They were from our block club, people taking petitions around. I’m a lawyer and I worked for a big law firm, Mayor Brown at the time

I became kind of the legal advisor to the campaign. We were trying to clean the street up, to run a liquor referendum. You have to get a lot of signatures in the fall in order to get it on the ballot in late February, March. So this is 2003 – we’re scurrying around in the fall. And I’m telling you, it’s a frightening scenario. You’re running into thugs that have been hired by the liquor industry. The liquor industry has gotten word of it and they’re doing everything they can to threaten us; to threaten the people who signed our petitions. We were operating on the notion we needed twice as many petition signatures as you need because they’re going to try to strike them.

(47:15)

And indeed they did during this time. I mean, it got so bad. Just give you an understanding of it. There was a rock, a brick thrown through the window of the Edgewater Community Council at that time. It’s already over on Broadway at that time and we are really receiving threats. Anne Sullivan was working for the Edgewater Community Council at that time. She was a great force, a great helper. She was the person that had been designated on staff to work on the referendum. So ECC was critical in this. We would get together once a week and check how many petitions had come in and get them notarized and have the people, who passed them, notarized, et cetera.

After we filed them, we did face challenges. And then what they did was they sent these thugs around that they hired to go out. Once they had our petitions, they went after every person who signed, they would buzz into a building at, let’s say, eight o’clock at night. Somebody is knocking on your door in common corridor buildings and wants you to take your signature off this petition. Or they would come up to you while you’re going to the “L” to go to work and then they want you to take your signature off this petition. People were frightened and many of them did apparently sign. I don’t know if they actually signed, because ultimately they brought those signatures into court and tried to have all of these people taken off of our petition claiming they had said they didn’t want to sign anymore.

(48:44)

What we discovered and I want to credit Anne Sullivan for this or bring it to my attention. She said, “Wait a minute. They didn’t notarize those properly.” And she was right. Here I was the lawyer and I’m looking at her going, “Darn, you’re right.” And we ended up ultimately in the appellate court. The court had to throw out their petition asking revocations of signatures. But we went through the referendum. We got on the ballot after all of their efforts to strike everything that we had. It’s down to a rainy day in late February full of sleet. I’m thinking, “I’ve done my job, I’ve done at my legal office, I’m not going to be involved anymore.” And I come and check on the votes late in the day. There’s Anne Sullivan, and she says, “We’re only ahead by two votes.”

(49:44)

We need more votes. And so I grab a bunch of people and say, we’re going out. We started ringing doorbells and saying, “Can we give you a ride?” You know, it was a horrible day. There was no other big election going on. So it was a bad day to be on the ballot. And we won. We won it. I’ll tell you; we only won by nine votes. It was a squeaker, but we won it. Lo and behold, of course, they sue us right away and they filed two lawsuits against us. They filed the first lawsuit challenging us on the descriptions of the address on the ballot and they filed a second one challenging the Chinese translation, the mandarin translation of the language, because for the first time, as they were running an election, and the election board had never done this, they were required because of the number of Chinese ethnic speakers in our neighborhood, they needed to translate into Chinese. Did they make an error? I don’t know. So we ended up with, they challenged it. So they challenged us on two levels and we had ended up with two trials. We ended up with that.

JM: They challenged us.

(50:50)

PS: They challenged us on two levels. My law firm, Mayor Brown, ended up funding me on a pro bono basis. I always say this, hundreds of thousands of dollars went into fighting to take these liquor licenses. And it went for two trials in the Cook County Circuit Court. We then went up with two appellate court cases. Ann Burke was an appellate court judge at that time on one of them. She ruled in our favor. Another very well-known judge was the judge on the other one and he ruled against us. It was really bizarre to have these two cases separate anyway. It went up to the Supreme Court. They were joined together and finally four years later, I got to argue it in both the appellate court and in the llinois Supreme Court, along with the election board of elections by the way, which their lawyers were very helpful to us all the way through. But we ended up getting an opinion from the Illinois Supreme Court that basically said we were right and threw out their challenges. So we got this in January of 2007 having started this in the fall of 2003. Now you have to wait for a mandate to come down.

(52:07)

PS: So there’s another 90 days, four months before you finally get to where I get the call from the lawyer for the board of elections. “Pat, you’re that may want to go out there. They’re going to be closing the liquor store today.” They come out of the sheriff’s office, comes out and they put a big glaring red sticker across the door, essentially saying to get all liquor must be out of here in 24 hours. This store is prohibited from selling liquor. And I tell this story and some people don’t believe, but I was watching the street every day after that. On my way to work, I was constantly watching it: on my way home. The guys in the big hoodies selling drugs, the prostitutes were gone almost overnight. Almost overnight it changed that block dramatically and immediately. I wonder what the relationship of liquor is to that kind of activity in our community that had been there for over at least two decades. The only thing I have to believe is that there was a relationship of selling drugs and helping minors buy liquor. It was the Loyola students. I don’t think Loyola necessarily agrees with me on this, but we actually went over to Loyola dorms and tried to get some of the Loyola students to sign our petitions who were old enough to vote and should be voting. We were told on the side, “We don’t really want to close those liquor stores. It’s where we get our liquor.” And I think there was an odd symbiotic relationship going on between those liquor stores and the university at that time.

And not the university, certainly, but I mean that some of the students preying on the [other] students is what I mean. But it’s odd when you pull out that one pin of the liquor store, the rest of it all fell away. And so we became very protective of that area. We’ve remained protective of that area. The Granville Task Force grew up to try to say, “Okay, we’ve gotten rid of these liquor stores. Now what else are we going to do to improve the shopping area, to bring other businesses in.” Many, many people are active in this. I can’t tell you how much credit I give to the Cercles for example, who have invested heavily in Granville, have come in. They owned property in the area at the time, but they also came in and worked on the liquor referendum with us. Today I know they are still struggling to make sure they can bring in good business to stabilize that commercial area.

(55:05)

RR: What is in the locations now with those two?

PS: So it’s pretty fabulous. There’s a Pete’s Pizza occupying the storefront where the Mashe liquor store was. They sell ice cream and they sell pizza and they serve those Loyola students very well. I mean, it’s always busy, umbrella tables out on the street in the summer, so it’s got a good face to the street. I believe that Sam’s chicken is still there.

JM: No, no, no, no. On the south side is the International…

PS: Still next door to Pete’s Pizza and Sam’s Chicken. I believe Mashe still owns both of the properties, the pizza and Sam’s Chicken, which isn’t apparently the part of the problem. It was the liquor.

(56:00)

JM: On the south side of the street, it’s called the International Mosaic School. Yes. And that’s part of the Cercles, who did that. And as Pat was saying, they’ve [the Cercles] have several properties, they’re all related to art galleries and mosaics that they’re doing there.

PS: Well, and we have, you know, Anne Sather’s has come over on the corner. We have a number of neat, small restaurants on that street now. There was later the redevelopment of what was a vacant lot at the time on the corner of Granville and Broadway into a high rise rental and condo building that also I think helps stabilize it. But it is interesting. Granville right now is a much stronger, much stronger commercial district. Must stronger block I think. The fact that it’s stronger helps the surrounding community as well. Yeah. It’s good.

(56:46)

RR: I would is a specific question of the both of you because it relates to what both of you. Then we’ll wrap up and talk about what you see in the future in terms of community involvement, community organization. But this specific question has to do with a cross street, because you’re talking about reviving Thorndale. You talk about reviving Bryn Mawr, a lot of activities that are happening there. What role you see those cross streets in terms of bringing Edgewater in? That I have to admit, I thought Granville would be the last, I mean it was so hard. I just take my hat off to you because that was the hardest nut to crack. I’ve always thought.

JM: You’re talking about Thorndale, Bryn Mawr?

(57:41)

RR: Yeah, the importance of the cross streets in bringing development.

JM: Sure. That’s all true. The “L” stations and the public transit there is where people get on and off in the community. I think the commercial prospects are always somewhat limited for them because they’re going to be convenience oriented places and they can have nice restaurants. Maybe they can have art galleries; they can have stuff. You look at commercial in our community overall, with the exception of Andersonville, almost all city communities are dramatically underserved commercially from a provider. In other words, they could support more than they have. And there are all kinds of reasons for that. But even you look at our big regional street on Broadway and you go up and down, like where we live at the 6200 block of Lakewood. Go look at the framing store. I see they have signs in there now that it was in business since 1928 or something like this. I mean, he’s been in business forever, but you watch, I wonder how long that’s going to be vacant now. And when things are vacant, they sit vacant for a long time. There’s very weak commercial demand. It’s not just something saying something bad about our community. I mean its retail use in general or retail space, but we feel it on these [properties]. So all I’m saying is something like a Broadway ends up having… on the east side of Broadway… now there’s a mixed use housing development going in community oriented development. Look, we live in the city. I think we have to emphasize residential and density and access. With our density, if you manage it right, can provide the backbone for an economic vibrancy as well.

(59:51)

PS: I don’t know if you know that Iwas involved with an initiative to talk about down zoning portions of Broadway, immediately around those streets that you’re talking about Bob, about more dense but in between not allowing the same density. So we don’t have the corridor effect that I think we’re seeing right now. Jump up right around Loyola’s entrance there at Broadway and Devon and you’d go down there right now and you’re beginning to feel like that Sheridan road corridor or some of the downtown, more dense neighborhoods. This has been a neighborhood with a lot of low rise housing, low rise buildings. Do you want it all to go to those high rises? I mean, it has to be some, in my mind, smart urban planning.

(1:00:56)

MH: It’s been wonderful to hear both of you talk about their involvement here in the neighborhood. And I know that there are sort of the universals and lessons that you teased out of all of the work that you’ve done. I wonder if you could share a few of those kinds of takeaways and in particular with an eye toward young people and their own civic engagement.

PS: Well, I’ll start on that then. We have three daughters that we raised in Edgewater. All of them just grow up thinking block clubs are everywhere and community engagement in our neighborhood, Edgewater, is everywhere. People know each other on their streets, are friendly, and everything else. So our middle daughter has just bought a building in Humboldt. She works in a not for profit and she just bought a building together with her partner in Humboldt Park. She actually sees it as providing a service. She wants to be a good landlord and she is a working like heck, putting in tremendous sweat equity. But she’s also working with the neighborhood to try to form a block club there. She is working with a block club and finding some racial tensions in the block club in Humboldt Park. She’s trying to be a voice for good.

On Halloween she started a thing where everybody sits out in front of their house and has candy. So it’s not a vacant street. They had our little Caroline when they went out and everybody had hot chocolate out on the street. You know, it’s kind of getting the sense of it. So we’re really proud that this is a kid who grew up in a city neighborhood and who really is very interested in all of these urban development issues. I think that I heard on the radio the other day that somebody thinks the Millennials are more socially involved than the Boomers were. She’s an example of one of those people and they live their politics. She won’t go watch the Bears anymore because of the position that the NFL has taken on guys taking the knee over civil rights.

So these young people have strong belief systems and my view is that we can only benefit from them and we need to continually involve them. I was telling Mark earlier, I think we have to keep the history in front of us though. That’s why the work that the Edgewater Historical Society is doing is so important because we can make the same mistakes. A lot of these people who are moving into Edgewater, in our neighborhood right now, don’t realize what Winthrop and Kenmore was like before, what some of this crime on the street was like, and the quality of life problems that we had. I fear they’re going to make mistakes unless we keep, we keep that information in front of them.

(1:04:00)

JM: Good. I will just say that I think that in Edgewater we have, one of the things we didn’t talk about this diversity in the housing. With so many studio, one bedroom, modestly priced housing, there’s tremendous opportunities for entry into the community for young people. Whether it’s people who are interested in the transit oriented development, whether it’s the students from Loyola that ended up living in the community, whether it’s people that are attracted to the activity and the vibrancy of an Andersonville - there’s a lot of things that attract people to the community. That’s access to me. So I think we continually have young people. We’re not an aging community. I mean we of course, we’ve always had an aging population, particularly in some high rises on Sheridan Road. We have seniors there, but still it’s vibrant because continual newcomers coming in. I think the challenge is of course to get them involved with a stake and a piece of the action. And then, getting involved in things in the community and in the schools.

(1:05:00)

PS: Going to schools is really important. For young families, having opportunities for schools in Chicago makes all the difference, you know. And we struggled. We had three kids at different schools at some point. We felt we couldn’t just go to our neighborhood school because it was not good when we were there. And so, right now, building the strength of our schools within the community I think is really important for keeping those young families here for a while. It’s another to keep these people here.

(1:05:34)

RR: Yeah, Edgewater schools are all at the number one level, whatever it is at the top level, all the schools. That’s great. And I have some tenants upstairs; they have two young girls. All the tenants I’ve had who have kids, they always move whene the kids are school age. They’re staying.

JM: Yea. Are they at Swift? That’s nice.

RR: They’re planning to stay in the neighborhood indefinitely.

PS: And we have people who have moved on to our block recently with young kids and bought on our block with young kids and we’re thrilled to see that too. I think it’s happening

(1:06:10)

JM: So, it was a fact of life. As our three kids grew up during that time, the number of kids that you would have in the circle, it’d be this big [arms expand wide] when it would the nursery center , what’d you call it? The Daycare Center?

PS: The Edgewater Tot Lot.

JM: It was the Edgewater Tot Lot. Worthy young mothers participated in the Co-op at the Presbyterian Church down at Bryn Mawr and Kenmore. And so there’d be this big circle. But then by the time you get to kindergarten, it’d be this big.[arms make smaller circle] Then when we got to first grade [small circle] and you realized as you go through grade school, there were never any new kids moving into neighborhood. There were these break off points at first grade and then at high school and so forth. But I think we can reverse that. There are so many more offerings now.

RR: Do you have any final words?

MH: We want to thank you both for your time and more than that, for your service and for all that you guys have done. And it’s really a thrill to hear you share a few stories. Good to talk about things.

PS: Thank you for this honor.