Today a search of "Chicago cemetery" finds a count of at least 1,293 stories about four Chicago-area cemetery workers accused of digging up hundreds of graves and dumping the remains so the burial plots could be resold. This diary looks at similar actions by city officials throughout history, and how it relates to the environment and digging up more coal.
Digging up bodies for profit is nothing new in Chicago. Mayor Daley is currently fighting to dig up the remains of 1,300 to expand O'Hare Airport, a $16 billion dollar project to reduce congestion at a time, the WSJ reports today
Air traffic has been easing in recent months as carriers continue to cut back capacity amid slack demand.
Just when, today, John Harris, Daley's former Chief of Staff and head of O'Hare expansion,
pleads guilty entagled with Blagojevich. More than one wonders what he has to say about buried bodies in a
$16-billion-plus O'Hare Airport expansion [which] is Daley's pot of gold for contracts, jobs and assorted patronage . . .That things have been kinky at the airport has been the common perception for years. . .
As Michael Kirchhoff of St. Johannes cemetery says
"When we bury our loved ones," Kirchhoff said, "I think the expectation is by all that it is their final resting place. That’s what they mean when they say final."
He is still fighting to keep the bodies buried where they are. His quote is repeated today by another victim of the latest monstrosity reported today, someone Daley would not consider a problem
"When you put them to rest, they're in peace," Hicks' daughter Precious Taylor said. "And just to think that someone would tamper with them, how do you go home and sleep after that?"
Regarding the difference in the relatively humane manner Chicago now goes about digging up the dead at St. Johannes for expansion, realize that Chicagoans continue to play in Lincoln park where 10,000 skeletal remains are buried under ball fields for the last 100 years from a botched move of a cemetery by city fathers.
Similarly, Chicago, the city that coal built, is home to leading politicians who are satisfied to create another generation's economy still digging coal. Let the fossils remain where they are buried.