By Ted Kleine
Today the “independent movement” is Shiller voting “no” when Mayor Daley’s budget passes 49-1. Her detractors say she’s an anachronism, no matter how hard she tries to adjust to the upwardly-mobile character of her ward. “She hasn’t been the same since the Berlin Wall collapsed,” one joked.
Longtime residents say the Newcomers can’t appreciate what “Helen” (nobody calls her Alderman Shiller) has done for Uptown, how she’s repaved the streets and repaired the backed-up sewers. The Newcomers weren’t living in Uptown when it was a drug-infested ghetto.
For years the press has been writing the same story about the 46th Ward: “Can Helen Shiller hang on against the rising tide of middle-class home owners invading her ward?” And every four years she squeezes past another challenger. The latest version of this story goes like this: “Will she ever lose?”
On the 4400 block of Malden, the Toyota comes to a halt. This is Shiller’s block. She’s rented the same three-bedroom apartment since 1975. During her starving activist days, she shared it with roommates, but now she lives here alone. She says she has no philosophical objection to owning property–her parents were home owners–but an alderman has a bruising schedule, so she likes having a landlord to fix any problems with the plumbing or the windows. And even though she’s rooted in Uptown, the “free spirit” in her still likes the thought that she could pick up and move any day.
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In 1988 a group of protesters camped out on the lot to complain that the CHA had set aside the land for public housing but let it lie empty for eight years. When the police threatened to arrest the demonstrators, Shiller decided to get in on the act of civil disobedience, making her one of the few aldermen ever to be jailed for something besides graft.
Shiller was so proud of the bust that she framed a copy of the Tribune’s write-up and hung it on the wall of her aldermanic office. It was the first and only time she’d been arrested, but nonetheless “there were all sorts of people waiting with bated breath, thinking, ‘Now we get her fingerprints and get her real history.’”
