Dear Ms. True,
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Imagine my surprise when I discovered, and this only by telephoning Mr. Joravsky to clarify a couple of points on the day of his deadline, that this central thrust of the story, one we had agreed on from the start, was entirely absent from it! I was able to insist that he reinsert the issue in a single paragraph, but this resulted in a somewhat schizophrenic aspect to the story, with no one else but me in the story addressing the issue and me identified in the story’s subheading as opposed to a loophole that would allow the bar to open. This is not a loophole but a contravention of city law. It is a contravention that is apparently endorsed by my local alderman, Ms. Toni Preckwinkle: as I related to Mr. Joravsky, Alderman Preckwinkle’s assistant Rebecca Janowitz told me on the telephone that she “doesn’t care how far the bar is from the school.” Mr. Joravsky was incredulous when I told him this and promised to question Ms. Janowitz about it, with whom he is apparently on a first-name basis, but of course it was completely absent from the story.
A loophole was discussed in the article, however, and that is the bar’s insistence that it is not in proximity to a school playground across the street because the playground is owned by a parent parish and not the school.
In the article I am portrayed simply as opposing the bar because of a possible nuisance from live music that it might present. Mr. Joravsky, somewhat sneeringly, asks at one point in his article: If the church doesn’t care about the bar using a loophole to get a license, why should he? I think that if such a question is going to be asked in the article then I should be allowed to respond, with statements I made in my interview to Mr. Joravsky that anticipated precisely this argument–although I expected it from my opponents, not the journalist writing up the story.
Well, I could go on and on. Mr. Joravsky insisted on quoting a letter of mine in his possession, to Mr. Hugo Sonnenschein, president of the University of Chicago, as if it related to the issue of the bar’s proximity to the school, when in fact it was written concerning the bar’s repeated and seemingly deliberate violations of the city’s construction code in their renovation work beside my home. These violations, which I outlined to Mr. Joravsky, are not mentioned in the article apart from his use of the fact that the bar’s owner, Mr. Bill Callahan, telephoned me to apologize for them. This is offered as proof of Mr. Callahan’s good will and ability to control the bar, but in fact, as Mr. Joravsky knows, the opposite is the case: the day after Mr. Callahan’s call, the bar again violated the city’s construction ordinance, which prompted the letter to Mr. Sonnenschein.
South Woodlawn
