For those of you who are not Chicagoans, we call the central downtown area “the Loop”. For years the late Mayor Daley had a simple strategy for ensuring that the same fate that had befallen other Midwestern cities, e.g. Detroit, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, with decaying city centers, did not happen in Chicago. He made sure that the city of Chicago and, particularly, the Loop remained the indispensable center of the metropolitan area. Every expressway went through downtown and the downtown area was kept safe and a magnet for suburbanites and tourists.
In the years following Boss Daley that has been less successful and under Lori Lightfoot’s tenure has mayor that has largely evaporated. For the first time the “Magnificent Mile” was actually sacked by rioters and there have been repeated break-ins and looting of high-end stores in Chicago’s downtown to the point where many Chicagoans and those who live in the metropolitan area are wary of coming downtown at all.
In the Washington Post Micheline Maynard presents her ideas on getting the “luster” back to the Magnificent Mile:
The biggest magnet in the late 20th century was Water Tower Place, which glistened on the stretch of North Michigan Avenue known as the Magnificent Mile. Boasting a collection of condos and a Ritz-Carlton hotel, this was Chicago’s first skyscraper mall, anchored on one end by a Lord & Taylor and by Chicago’s own Marshall Field’s (later supplanted by Macy’s).
But on a swing down Michigan during Easter Week, I observed a much less magnificent sight than in decades past. “For Lease†signs screamed from empty stores on nearly every block. The Water Tower corner that had previously housed Macy’s stood ominously vacant, eight stories of disused space.
This is a retail abandonment pattern that’s echoed in downtowns across North America: In Detroit, such retailing pioneers as designer John Varvatos, Under Armour and Madewell, who set up shop there after the city’s bankruptcy, have all vanished, while in Toronto, a branch of the Hudson’s Bay department store is closing.
The pandemic, which sent many downtown office workers home, is partly to blame. After declining from a previous mark set in 2021, Chicago office vacancies jumped again at the end of March to a record of 21.2 percent, as more businesses decide not to renew their leases.
And when no one is there, the shops are bare. Tourists alone can’t make up for the locals who pop in on their lunch hours or after work. It’s not that Chicago lacks for pedestrian traffic. Plenty of casually dressed people in sneakers and athleisurewear were out on the sunny spring afternoon of my visit. Many appeared more interested in physical exercise than in exercising their credit cards, however. Instead of venturing inside Water Tower Place, they walked right past to paths along Lake Michigan, which appeared as crowded as the sidewalks.
It takes her several more paragraphs to mention the critical point:
Even before covid-19, online shopping was stealing business from these storefronts. Meanwhile, Chicago continues to wrestle with random crime that appears to have hit everywhere, including carjackings and attacks on public transit despite multiple efforts to halt them.
Visitors must feel safe. The way to ensure that is to remember that we have a law enforcement system. It’s not just the police. It does no good for police officers to arrest people only to have their cases rejected by the Cook County States Attorney or dismissed by judges. It’s not a problem of resources. The Cook County States Attorney’s office employs 1,100 people, 700 of whom are lawyers. The problem is productivity and, frankly, a disinclination under Kim Foxx to prosecute. Right now we don’t have a system. We have a bunch of people at cross-purposes pointing fingers at each other.
DA Kim Foxx is not the problem; she is a symptom. The problem is the black underclass, a group of people who are very low IQ (70’s), impulsive, and prone to violence. Almost all the violence in Chicago is committed by the 15 to 30 year-old males in that demographic group, but not all of them.
This group has no economic role in modern society, and they live off White charity (taxes). They require very heavy policing, just for their own safety and the safety of their black neighbors. Obama, Lightfoot, Foxx, and delusional Whites refuse to recognize reality because of their ideological pretensions.
There will be no recovery of the “Magnificent Mile.” That is as dead as Pompeii. When you add Antifa, BLM, and the hundreds of thousands of homeless to the marauding black and Hispanic gangs, it is clear that American cities are dead. The majority of them have fallen to Third World status.
You see none of this in either Russia or China. Their cities are thriving, clean and safe. But you do see similar problems of homelessness and street violence throughout western Europe from Oslo and Stockholm south to London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Athens… If Russia can avoid the nuclear war that the US is planning, Russia and China together will be the next world hegemon, and the West will decline into insignificance. Six hundred years of western domination is over.
Your family, at least, should be camping on the Upper Peninsula right now.
Foxx is part of the Soros woke DA clan. I saw an interview with her with a central question being the 33%-50% increase (relative to Anita Alverez) in her failure to prosecute violent crimes. Her answer was arrogant and almost to the point of “I don’t know what that crazy bitch was doing.”
Any time I speak with a Chicagoan these days they will talk about the crime – against retailers and individuals – on the Mag Mile, Lincoln Park, Lakeview etc. This was almost unheard of when I was there.