“By far the most controversial feature of the brownfields initiatives is not that of liability reforms but of lowering the standards for cleanup,” writes Stephanie Goldberg in the Chicago-based ABA Journal. “The object is not necessarily to restore the land to a pristine state but to make the risks of toxicity consistent with its future use; in other words, to protect the public from undue risk, not from risk itself.” Says Jim Van der Kloot, an environmental scientist with U.S. EPA’s Region V office, “The old-style approach [was] that contamination in itself is evil and needs to be corrected.”
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“Gang activity has surfaced in major institutions and corporations in the Chicago area,” says the Chicago Crime Commission in its 1996 annual report. For instance, “the leader of a notorious street gang was admitted to a Chicago hospital after being shot. Members of a rival gang, who had been hired by the hospital for legitimate positions, began to threaten the patient. Members of the wounded leader’s gang attempted to enter the hospital to protect him. Quick intervention by hospital security prevented a potentially deadly situation with many innocent victims.”
Life in the hood. According to Providence-St. Mel’s newsletter “Cornerstone” (Winter), student “Anthony Davenport…stays energized by focusing on college and his future career as an obstetrician. For him, the choice for his free time is clear: ‘Going outside will only get you in trouble.’”
“The Christian right is dead wrong when it insists that abortion violates traditional American morality,” writes Debbie Nathan in In These Times (February 17), reviewing Leslie Reagan’s new book, When Abortion Was a Crime. “Consider Chicago in the ’30s. In the heart of the Loop, practically next door to Marshall Field’s, was the Gabler abortion clinic. Each week it performed dozens of procedures in a facility whose equipment rivaled that of the best hospitals. Gabler attracted patients by distributing business cards to pharmacies and beauty shops. It also received referrals from the city’s most respected physicians.”
