Jens Jensen, the dean of Prairie School landscape architecture, built the Columbus Park Refectory in 1921 because he felt Chicagoans “need the quietude of the pastoral meadow and the soothing green of grove and woodland in contrast with the noise and glare of the great city.”
The Refectory — which can be rented for $2,900 for weekend weddings –epitomized just noise and glare on Thursday. Its porticos were filled with rancor, not with sun, and the most revealing moments, missed by the news media, were found later in the elegant main hall.
Former and current gang members beckoned reporters to a serene island amid the impoverished Austin neighborhood. They wanted to vent over the faux news of a belated disclosure of an Aug. 17 meeting among gang bangers, victims of crime and Jody Weis, the police superintendent, whose stock among rank-and-file officers is reaching BP depths.
That August gathering in Garfield Park included families of gang victims and Mr. Weis using a carrot and a sledgehammer. He offered to help gang members with jobs and social services, but warned that if the killings did not stop, he would swarm them with conspiracy charges and other prosecutorial gambits.
Gov. Pat Quinn and others chided Mr. Weis for talking to the gang members, though such “negotiating” has gone on for decades between law enforcement and bad guys. There’s evidence here and nationwide that such admonitions — and lures of jobs and other services — do succeed, cutting crime and recidivism rates.
Perhaps Mr. Weis was tone deaf to the public ramifications that would come from his taking a direct role, though it seems a non-event within the police department. Its members were already angry over manpower shortages and disputed personnel moves and by Mr. Weis’s referring to federal prosecutors the case of an officer who beat a man shackled to a wheelchair; by his signaling that he thinks the force is lax and fat (literally); and by his being a non-Chicagoan and an F.B.I. alumnus derisively nicknamed J-Fed.
If Mr. Weis were to stand on the front line of a battle, take out his digital sword and shout “Charge!” he would not be trampled by zealous underlings.
At the Refectory meeting, the gang attendees bemoaned a lack of respect for their neighborhoods, an inattention from businesses, a “corrupt” City Hall and displeasure with Mr. Weis’s threats to use federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act statutes to corral gang members.
One of the most vocal attendees was Wallace Bradley, a prominent former gang leader who once barely lost a race for Third Ward alderman and who, for three decades, has been a strong advocate for marginalized youth.
Mr. Bradley and others emoted, then the cameras left. So did I, before doing a U-turn and returning to check out the Refectory’s interior. The park is a National Historic Landmark not well-known to us on the faraway North Side.
I found news conference participants crashing the monthly meeting of the West Side Ministers Coalition in the main hall. Roughly 75 ministers and allies were discussing bread-and-butter matters like foreclosures, jobs, health care and community development.
The crashers (absent Mr. Bradley) declined to sign in or sit down. They quickly, and menacingly to some, confronted the ministers about the meeting with Mr. Weis and demanded action.
When the lead minister made clear that “I am an ex-offender and walked the same path as you” but that the agenda couldn’t accommodate them, the intruders shouted, “The church isn’t part of the community!” and “You should be embarrassed with yourself!” before exiting in a huff.
I called Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociology professor at Columbia University and expert on Chicago gangs. His book “Gang Leader for a Day” is a heralded look at crack-sellers and poverty in Chicago.
Fifteen years ago, he said, Mr. Bradley “would have been surrounded by clergy, block-club presidents and aldermen.”
“The political base has moved on to other causes,” Mr. Venkatesh said. “An aging leadership doesn’t have the same power to marshal young people.”
Mr. Weis should meet with Mr. Bradley and other frustrated people to gin up support for tougher policing, Mr. Venkatesh said. Local commanders should lay down new rules to gang members, while mainstream groups like Partnership for New Communities and the Civic Committee can create jobs programs for poor youth.
The past need not be prologue. The news media’s facile pessimism need not rule. Even without pastoral meadows, the big-city noise and glare can be tempered.
I’ve wond why gang memebers aren’t prosecuted for ‘contributing to the deliquency of minors when they recruit kids into the gangs.
Also, nothing going to work until the kids get educated. They have no skills and thus the only manhood they can come up with is violence and dominance.
Norman Berger