For 26 years Peter Florakos has been grilling meat and serving up Old Style at the Best Steak House, located at Wilson and Broadway, the epicenter of Uptown. Despite a spotless record with the liquor commission, however, Florakos could be forced to close if newer residents of the 32nd Precinct pass a vote-dry initiative. “These new people come to the neighborhood and think they can just change everything,” says the beleaguered businessman. “You come here, fine. Just don’t kick me out. I am the victim, not the problem.”
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Michael McElroy, a young attorney and two-year resident of the 35th, scoffs at the idea that he and his fellow petitioners are trying to gentrify Uptown by means of the ballot box. “Preposterous! Those people are essentially saying that the people who live here, who range over all economic levels, don’t deserve to live in a good neighborhood.” McElroy says the petitioners are concerned about safety, “business management,” and “quality of life”; by banning the sale of liquor they hope to eliminate littering, fighting, prostitution, public drunkenness and defecation, aggressive panhandling, and verbal harassment. “Walking down Wilson, people think their lives are in jeopardy because of the crime and chaos,” says David Rowe, a building manager in the area for six years. “Quality businesses won’t open up around here. The only things we can attract are pawnshops, beeper stores, and liquor stores.”
Some neighbors say most of the 32nd’s problems stem from Sunrise Liquors at 1231 W. Wilson, a place that draws the ire of both activists and liquor licensees. Residents say Sunrise maintains a laissez-faire attitude toward the gangbangers and drug dealers loitering around it. Sunrise’s management did not respond to interview requests, but the mayor’s licensing committee confirms that it has litigation pending against Sunrise based on two allegations of selling to minors and five allegations relating to having an unlicensed firearm on the premises. No other Uptown establishments targeted by the vote-dry initiatives have such charges pending against them. Anger with Sunrise boiled over after a drive-by shooting took place outside the store in March, but according to Rowe, repeated attempts to get Sunrise to clean up its act, including a turnout of 70 residents for a recent liquor commission hearing, have been ignored.
Other voices in the community oppose the vote-dry movement on more principled grounds. “Complaining about people, driving [them] into somebody else’s neighborhood is not necessarily the model of good citizenship,” says Phoebe Helm, president of Truman College near Wilson and Broadway. “It’s not a very neighborly solution. We ought to be working together to help folks obtain the housing and services they need. All of us can have an improved quality of life, but it must include all of the people around us.” Shiller seconds that view: “These questions which on their face appear to be so simple rarely are. We’re better served, rather than pointing the finger, by really looking at solutions that have some depth to them.” And Solomon Chu, executive director of Uptown’s chamber of commerce, thinks banning liquor sales could actually hurt the rehabilitation of the neighborhood, particularly regarding the Wilson Yard redevelopment plan, which is trying to attract new enterprises to the corner of Broadway and Montrose, where a CTA bus barn was destroyed by fire in 1996. Says Chu, “You eliminate the possibility of better-run stores, new restaurants, whatever, from opening up here when you handcuff them with restrictions.”
