Let me begin by saying that I'm not one of Richard M. Daley's biggest fans. My wife is a Chicago Public Schools teacher, and as such has been forced to work under a string of (what we shall politely call) knuckle-heads who have been tasked with running CPS over the years. Some have been better than others -- Paul Vallas comes to mind -- and others have been an absolute nightmare. So that's one of the things I'd say that Daley definitely fell down on the job at handling: Education.
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I credit his wife, the wonderful Maggie Daley, for helping to turn Chicago into a much more beautiful city than it was before Daley took the reins. From all accounts it was she who was the driving force behind the mayoral throne where matters of city beautification were concerned. When friends of mine come to visit, their jaws usually drop when I tell them what used to exist where the amazing Millennium Park now sits: abandoned railway tracks and gravel lots. On a summer day when you stand in the beautiful park with its gardens and Band shell, looking out over the city and all the people joyfully visiting the Park, you can't help but pinch yourself when you realize that you're standing on a site that only a bit more than a decade previous, had been an empty lot just a step above a garbage dump. On Michigan Avenue. One the lakefront. A few short steps from the heart of one of the world's great city.
And then there's all the wrought iron fences and planters and flowers and trees that exist throughout the city where once only weeds thrived. The meridian on Lake Shore Drive had nothing more than a few scrawny trees and meager patches of grass on them which the cops used to park on while they waited for speeders. Now the North Bound and South Bound lanes are separated by miles of beautiful trees, flowers and ornamental grasses which the City does a fantastic job of tending too. They had to slow the speed limit down to 40 to help protect the plants from salt spray in the winter, but it was more than worth the inconvenience in my book.
I often drive home from work over the bridge crossing the Chicago Rive on North Avenue and marvel how beautiful the new bridge is (not to mention how much wider it it -- from two lanes to four!) And it lights up! And they can change the colors of the lights with the seasons, which may not sound like a big deal, but its really the sort of thing that lifts people's spirits and make them love Chicago.
But the last thing I'd like to thank Mayor Daley for doing -- and it may sound silly to folks who don't live here or venture into the neighborhoods where people park their cars in front of their homes -- is finally having the guts to crack down on the practice of using lawn chairs to hold parking spots during the winter. We just suffered through a terrible blizzard here a couple of weeks ago, and the customer here is to shovel your car out on the street and then put some piece of cheap furniture (like a lawn chair) into the spot you shoveled to call dibs on it. It sort of makes sense for a couple of days until most of the spots are shoveled out, but when a week, and then two weeks go by and people are still claiming those spots something really should be done about it. But for decades those chairs would stay out for weeks and weeks until the snow would be all gone -- and some people would still try to claim the spots as their own!
Until Mayor Daley, a few years back, finally put his foot down to say: Enough. And now that the City of Chicago has finished cleaning up the Garbage left behind from the Blizzard, they will be sending the Garbage trucks through the neighborhoods to collect all those lawn chairs and milk cartons still sitting in the streets, guarding against claim jumpers. Doing so may have cost Daley a few votes over the years (the sort of people who leave lawn chairs in those spots until May are the same sort of people who will be furious to find their lawn chairs are now in a City Garbage Truck) but I'm sure he's picked up just as many from people like myself who loathed the practice.
Thank You Mr. Mayor!