By Neal Pollack
Mejorado took a breath. “I’ve been in that building 22 years. They’re saying people in that building are drug dealers, and when they say that they’re referring to me! I work 44 hours a week. I have three kids. Where are my kids going to go? We’re being relocated. My neighbors are being relocated. I have neighbors who I don’t consider drug dealers. They’re decent people trying to make a living….You’ve gotta help us. We’re in the community, too. We’re being pushed out. I am all for cleaning up the neighborhood, but don’t clean it out!”
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Larry Turpin, pastor of the Rogers Park Presbyterian Church, stayed behind. He was at the meeting on an unrelated issue. Turpin says Moore talked to Chico privately after the task force members left. Then Moore stood in front of the board to speak. He apologized for contradicting the task force, but, he warned, the Virginian was about to go into a sealed-bid auction. If the board didn’t purchase the building immediately, it would be lost. According to Turpin, Moore went on to characterize the Virginian as a neighborhood scourge, full of “terrible people,” and he said it should be demolished.
“I was shocked and appalled,” Turpin says. “My jaw was on the floor. He completely undid everything the task force had just done. I went up to him afterwards and said, ‘I hope you will work with the task force on this.’ He said, ‘Yes.’”
At a December 10 community meeting, Alderman Moore presented a plan to create a “campus” around Gale Academy. Under the plan, several buildings fronting Howard Street near Ashland Avenue would be demolished, including a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise and a strip mall that contains a pawnshop and an adult video store. Ashland would be closed off north of Howard, and the entire area, including the present Kiwanis playground, would be turned into a park. The plan, which carries a $6 million price tag, calls for a baseball diamond, two play lots, a field house, and the demolition of the Virginian, which would be converted into a parking lot.
Tobin and the task force persisted. They staged protests at City Hall and in front of an Evanston branch of Bank One. They tried to identify other sites in the neighborhood for a parking lot. Meanwhile, Moore was meeting with various factions of Gale Academy’s local school council, and last week it voted 10-1 for his plan. Moore had already met with residents of the Virginian on January 3 to tell them they were probably going to have to move. They would get the Board of Education’s standard relocation package–$1,500 plus moving expenses.
“The way he’s presented it is, here’s a plan. Do you want a park or not? And if that’s the question, then, of course, we want a park, too. He’s framing it as there’s only one plan, there’s only one possibility. Any discussion otherwise means no park. So given that framing, for the most part, people would say, ‘Yeah, if that’s the way it is, then, sure, I guess we have to have a park.’”
