By Ben Joravsky
According to Passage, he’s sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into the building he bought in 1979, repairing the elevators and remodeling almost every floor. “We have our photo studio here, we have classrooms, we have our designers–this is where we produce catalogs and books,” says Corrine Passage, Leo’s daughter and chief aide. “We believe in Rogers Park. My dad raised our family here. We want to stay here because we like the neighborhood, and many of our employees live here.”
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Apparently the Passages didn’t always feel that way. In 1994 they put the building up for sale (asking, they say, $825,000). “We had a high default rate on our student loans,” says Corrine Passage, “and we felt that maybe it wasn’t working here to run a school.” But by November 1996 they had changed their minds. “We brought our default rate down,” she says. “We were taking in fewer students by being more restrictive in our admissions. We closed a few classrooms, but we want to stay.”
Furthermore, the Passages say Moore and the developers have treated them as unwanted intruders. “We were not invited to DevCorp’s planning meetings,” says Corrine Passage. “I was at a meeting where one of the developers was talking about the project, and I asked, ‘What’s the status of Pivot Point?’ Apparently she didn’t even recognize me, because she said, ‘Unfortunately, the owner has let it decay.’ How could she say that? We put a lot of money into the building. It shows they were just writing us off.”
“I respect what Pivot Point has done for Rogers Park. They’re a great local institution. I’m willing to do what I can to find them another space. But as much as I respect them, we can’t have them at the spot and have the shopping center too. Every planner will tell you, you can’t have a successful shopping center practically hidden behind a big building.”
