Letter to the editor:
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Mary Edsey and Sharon Woodhouse, sincerely civic-minded citizens who organized the protest, were pushed aside by Alderman Eugene C. Schulter (47th) who “not only attended [the meeting] but dominated it,” in Joravsky’s well-chosen phrase. Schulter, master of telling selected lies in self-pitying terms, got credit from some irate residents for calling the meeting; in truth, he would have preferred there be no meeting at all. Until Edsey and Woodhouse called the ad hoc gathering, Schulter, who never met a developer he didn’t like, had the redevelopment of the Davis building under wraps. Ravenswood planning and zoning decisions were generally kept there until sprung full-blown on a puzzled community. Witness the Lincoln Square Mall, the Levy Senior Center, removal of the YMCA, and conversion of Hild library to private use at public expense.
For several years I served uncomfortably as secretary of the Ravenswood Community Council until finally I was drummed out for suggesting that its annual meeting this year be devoted to a community inventory I called “Rearranging Ravenswood.” Such a meeting would have attempted to examine the impact of wholesale condominium conversions, new demands on Ravenswood infrastructure, what the aesthetic and practical impacts have been of city “streetscapes” and mixed zoning on commercial streets, and the effect of concentrating entertainment venues in the vicinity of the Old Town School of Folk Music quartered–through Alderman Schulter’s benevolence–in the former Hild Regional Library building.
