Yes, by all means, people, put Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s name on the Chicago Riverwalk. Geez.
Love him, hate him or, like me, reserve judgment on his mixed record over eight years in office until history puts it into perspective. But give him his due when it comes to driving the extension and renovation of a dramatically appealing urban amenity, the paved waterfront promenade along the south bank of the Chicago River from the lakefront to west of North Orleans Street, where the river splits.
It was the first thing I took an out-of-town guest to several days ago when I wanted to show off my city on a delightful spring day. The riverwalk offers an exquisite combination of touristy and real Chicago, of natural, architectural and infrastructural beauty.
As the path continues to lengthen, generations of Chicagoans yet unborn will be as grateful for the effort to open the riverfront to the public as we are today to those who preserved the lakefront.
The riverwalk project began before Emanuel took office in 2011 and will continue after he leaves office Monday, but there’s no denying that his focus on it has been transformational.
“In 2011, I decided we’re going to make the Chicago River the next recreational park and become a two-waterfront city,” Emanuel told my colleague Chris Jones in an interview published May 5. “Thus we have gotten closer to fulfilling Daniel Burnham’s dream about the river as a park than at any time in the last hundred years.”
On Monday, the day Emanuel unveiled improvements on the eastern leg of the riverwalk from Michigan Avenue to Lake Shore Drive, Fran Spielman of the Sun-Times reported that Emanuel has been dropping hints that he’d like the pathway to bear his name.
I say sure. We will always refer to simply “The riverwalk” in conversation — “The Emanuel” simply isn’t descriptive enough and “The Emanuel Riverwalk” is an unnecessary mouthful given that there’s no other Chicago riverwalk with which to confuse it.
His name should be on the entrance arches the way the city puts names on honorary street signs — as a tribute, not as an effort to change how we reference it.
But let’s wait five years.
In situations like this I usually invoke my “hall of fame” rule. That rule requires that, when faced with the urge to slap a politician’s name onto public property, we emulate how pro baseball and pro football halls of fame require players to have been inactive for at least five years before they can be considered for induction. (Hockey and basketball make their luminaries wait only three years.) The purpose is to prevent cheap sentiment and spasms of nostalgia from coloring the cool judgment of time.
For instance, the years have not been kind to Emanuel’s predecessor, Richard M. Daley. The further his six terms as mayor recede in memory, the more fiscally irresponsible and ultimately destructive Daley seems.
He dined on our seed corn — most notably by selling 75 years’ worth of parking meter revenue for a paltry $1.15 billion in 2008. He failed to make the painful decisions that would have kept local pension funds healthy. He left flaming piles of debt for the Chicago Public Schools and Chicago Transit Authority. I need not go on.
There’s a reason that a neighborhood branch library is still and perhaps forever the most significant public structure to bear Richard M. Daley’s name (compared with his exhaustively honored father, Richard J. Daley). By 2024, similarly harsh retrospective assessments may discourage us from putting the Emanuel name on the riverfront jewel he relentlessly championed.
I’m resisting the urge to denigrate or to celebrate Emanuel’s reign as it wraps up. He made his share of mistakes, not always for the best of reasons, but he also had his share of triumphs.
Part of how we end up evaluating his two terms on City Hall’s fifth floor will depend on the performance of his successor, Lori Lightfoot. Will she expose Emanuel’s shortcomings by curbing corruption, bolstering struggling neighborhoods, reducing crime, improving schools and shoring up city finances in ways he didn’t? Or will she regularly remind us how nearly impossible the mayor’s job is?
I like and admire Lightfoot. I think she’s honest, tough, fair and smart. But I doubt even those attributes are enough to work the sort of magic she’s promised to work — to reconcile the competing demands of constituencies and interest groups while lifting all boats, balancing the books and planning well for the future.
Many of us who will second-guess her mercilessly would never in a million years want to be her.
She will blunder. She will infuriate. But with luck she will also prevail in many ways, hopefully with at least one signature improvement that will, by rights, one day, proudly bear her name.
More scary Trumpian dishonesty
For me, the worst section of the Chicago Riverwalk is the one in which the name “Trump” can be seen in 20-foot-high letters on the side of a skyscraper on the north side of the river.
Apparently I’m not the only one nauseated by this monument to the president’s swollen ego — The Washington Post recently reported that the associated Trump hotel has had “a string of bad years” since Donald Trump became a presidential candidate.
No surprise or even shame in that. Politicians are divisive figures and Trump isn’t popular in Illinois. As host John Williams of WGN-AM 720 observed on the latest “Mincing Rascals” podcast, if there had been a Hotel Obama in Kansas City during the previous presidential administration, business would probably have fallen there.
But instead of acknowledging that reality, the Trump Organization exhibited the same sort of churlish, defiant dishonesty that Trump himself exhibits when confronted with an uncomfortable truth: “The perceived threat of gun violence has harmed visitation to the destination,” it said in a statement to the Post.
But as the Post and Crain’s Chicago Business reported, public filings show that competing luxury hotels in Chicago have experienced gains in the last three years that mirror the Trump’s losses.
And while gun violence is certainly a terrible problem, it’s mostly confined to troubled neighborhoods and hasn’t stopped the city from setting new tourism records for eight straight years.
I suppose we should all be used to ego-fluffing mendacity from Team Trump by now, but I continue to find this sort of fleeing from the truth deeply ominous.
Facing uncomfortable realities is a necessary skill for effective leadership, particularly for those charged with guiding the nation in a messy and fraught world. A bit of humility isn’t a weakness, and blind arrogance can be a fatal flaw.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s online reader poll for funniest tweet is from “Side Piece” and would have been more timely last weekend: “According to this card I just got from my 8-year-old, I’m the ‘best mom ever,’ which does not say much for the rest of you.”
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Twitter @EricZorn
