Editorial

We, ChathamNOW, feel it is time for residents in the community to form a non-profit group to be called Friends of the Whitney Young Branch of the Chicago Public Library, for the sole purpose of garnering private funds for the building of a 100-seat amphitheater for lectures and symposiums in the newly constructed branch library, due for opening in January, 2011. So it is time for the Oprah Winfreys, Bill Cosbys, Spike Lees, Michael Jordans, Magic Johnsons, and Tiger Woods of the world to pull out those hefty checkbooks and invest like any municipal bond venture and create a private fund to make this project a reality with real money coming from real places in a bank account by the end of April, 2011, so that it will ready and railing to go for the Public Building Commission of Chicago's public hearings on the new library construction in November. Especially for a place with no greater need for jobs for their people, most definitely, for their young people, than Chatham, that the new construction alone would create. The support of President Barack Obama with the release of federal economic stimulus funds will be most appropriate in funding the elevator, amphitheater, and plant maintenance contracts on a sustainable basis. We feel it is time for all the leaders in politics and business in our community to canvass President Barack Obama to provide federal largess through a stimulus package of $5-$7 billion dollars to revitalize Chatham through rebuilding, remodeling, rehabbing our housing stock, resurfacing our streets, especially the main arteries of 79Th Street and King Drive, rebuilding and modernizing our infrastructure at all levels, fortifying our public works, and reinvigorating our retail sector with new department stores that contrast the suburban malls. And it might be a good idea to propose an athletic center, a fitness club to be built on the site of the former Rhodes Theater vacant lot at 79Th and Rhodes Avenue like that of BosseSports in Boston. See bossesports.com. It is up to them, our local community leaders to meet President Obama, one-on-one in person, in the Oval Office to seek out this federal funding to turn Chatham around from a deteriorating neighborhood, ghettoized by apathetic newcomers to a great, reborn area with a high standard of living, an unparalleled level of comfort. Let us begin right away, shirt sleeves up, and proposals for the future ready. We feel it is high time for all community leaders to invite President Barack Obama to a dinner party with canopies set up in the parking lot behind Mayor Harold Washington's favorite restaurant, Izola's, at 79Th Street and Rhodes Avenue, with U.S. Senator Roland W. Burris as the official host (he is a long-time Chathamite), and have the dinner party the Mayor had in September, 1986, after he won the City Council battle, known familiarly as "Council Wars" and present economic development proposals for Chatham from federal stimulus funding to create jobs desperately needed, especially for the young people in the neighborhood, and to build a community center, a senior citizens center at the vacant lot at 82ND Street and King Drive, and a health and fitness club on the vacant lot that was the former site of Rhodes Theater at 79Th Street and Rhodes Avenue, like Bosse Sports in Boston, and to invite the upscale building of trendy shops and restaurants and tony places for people to dance and relax, like elegant supper clubs, to revitalize the area with a cash infusion of $5-7 billion dollars (you should know the nationwide white community received billions of dollars of federal largess under President Ronald Reagan to build absolutely beautiful neighborhoods all over the United States and a comfortable living in suburbia). So let's not waste time doing so. We appreciate the viral feedback from the literally thousands of residents through numerous blogs from all over the South Side of Chicago and even from the six collar counties, concerning the commentary on whether Chatham should be South Looped. Some have even proposed being Hyde Parked as more in line with what they have thought Chatham always was. We feel that a South Loop model would be the best for Chatham for two reasons. First, with all the damage done by the thug element of the younger generation (hoodlums and gang-bangers [black teenagers and young adults from broken homes] and bad-ass kids with little or no parenting--project people from prison), and second, the fact that the standard of living achieved by the suburban white community is now, since 1968, rising to be 40 years ahead of the black community, including Chatham, only a full-fledged South Loop overhaul is necessary to bring Chatham to what it must be, and most importantly, ought to be, and that is equivalent to the current comfortable standard of living enjoyed by the white community in the affluent suburban areas since 1980, all over the United States (as Chatham was in the 1950's and 60's). We feel that an overhaul, a complete rejuvenation of the neighborhood is needed. Some say Chatham is already a vibrant community; the problem with this view is that it is very limited: it ignores the fact that the people from the projects as Section 8 occupants have destroyed what was a good middle class life in Chatham; the thug element and the riff-raft up and down 79Th Street simply does not care, and other newcomers from other areas don't have a clue as to what Chatham was to the black community in the 1950's and 60's: once upon a time there was a Daley's Drugstore, a Hi-Low grocery, a Vito's grocery, two Certified's, a Rexall, numerous fresh bakery outlets, a Gracie's pancake house, a Dairy Queen, a Baldwins ice cream store, several Jewel's (inside Chatham proper), a Dominick's, a stationery store, a bowling alley, and we can go on and on and on, even with home delivery every morning of Wanzer's milk and Home Juice orange and cranberry juice at your doorstep at 7 a.m. Chatham needs a huge infusion of federal funds in the form of $5-7 billion stimulus dollars to reverse the damage done to public and private property, create good-paying jobs, improve the public works, infrastructure and city services, upgrade the technology in the public grid. There is nothing wrong in seeing Chatham recapture its status again today--an enclave, a neighborhood in the black community that uniquely had the identical standard of living, quality of life, as that found in the white community we know as affluent suburbia--where Chatham achieved an unparalleled level of extreme comfort for all its residents. It's TIME TO BUILD!