A Chip Off Chicago's Old Boss

By STEPHEN BRAUN

Aug. 24, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CHICAGO —

The old man would have approved.

All summer long, the city that was once the personal fief of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley has undergone a personality transplant, courtesy of Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Just as his father did 28 summers ago, when he ordered crews to swab vacant lots with fresh paint, the son has mobilized an army of municipal workers to transform Chicago’s blunt cityscape into a garden paradise. The metamorphosis, muting old river bridges and demolished buildings with tulips and banners, is scheduled to last only a week, timed perfectly for the Democratic National Convention.

Overnight, a steel sculpture that sat neglected for years in the city’s financial district was installed near a busy freeway ramp. Demolition crews razed a brace of tomb-like housing project high-rises near the convention site, replacing them with a neo-Victorian scene of street lamps and flower beds. Even the balding carpets and fraying furniture in Daley’s City Hall office are gone, as part of a $228,000 renovation.

This is the way things once worked in Chicago, when Daley’s father, Boss of all that he surveyed, would bark into a telephone and stir the fabled Chicago Democratic political machine into action. The machine is a broken-down engine these days, but even without its legendary ability to alchemize patronage into action, a Daley is once again Chicago’s prime mover.

After seven years in office, a period marred by early mistakes and righted by a finely honed sense of what flies in his town, Rich Daley, 54, has matured into a formidable figure in his own right, arguably the most effective big-city mayor in the nation.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss--but reigning over a shrunken political culture and hemmed in by cold economic realities that have dried up government funding for the sweeping public projects that old man Daley once used to transform Chicago’s skyline.

“Considering what the current breed of mayor is up against, he gets things done,” said Chicago political historian and University of Illinois professor Melvin G. Holli. “On that score, he’s at the head of his league.”

Daley the younger has mastered the era of low expectations: He is obsessed with stabilizing his city’s eroding neighborhoods instead of bulldozing them. His self-appointed mission, to keep Chicago viable by catering to dwindling middle-class families and businesses, colors almost everything he does, from taking over the city’s schools to fencing off every available spit of land, a Daley trademark.

But critics say his single-minded emphasis has come at the expense of the city’s poor and voiceless. “Corporate Chicago and white middle-class taxpayers are comfortable with a Daley,” said Jacqueline Leavy, executive director of the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group, a consortium of 200 community organizations. “But race relations is still an enormous problem in Chicago, and his attention is focused elsewhere.”

“Rich” to his admirers, “Little Richie” to his detractors, the short, red-faced Daley stays close to his roots, a political Everyman to Chicagoans. “Hey, Mare!” they say when they want a word with him, and as long as he is not blowing his stack at some inept government functionary, Daley is happy to oblige.

“I’m not here to just sit in the seat. I work at it. I get here early and get out there and do it,” Daley says. His syntax is tortured, but authentic--and it grows on voters, who have elected him mayor three times, each successive one by widening margins (his father served six terms before his death in 1976).

Daley shares his father’s weakness for grand-scale gestures. The father’s sweeping legacy is still debated--he is credited with highways and O’Hare Airport, and reviled for the Robert Taylor Homes, a towering mile-long scar of South Side housing projects. His son’s first-term plans for building a new airport and erecting lake-shore casinos were snuffed out by resistant Republican leaders in Springfield, the state capital.

But Daley still took on this year’s Democratic convention, well aware he would be point man for nagging questions about his father’s heavy-handed grip on the 1968 debacle. The son could have let it pass, but the chance to showcase Chicago--his town, not his father’s--was too tempting.

“It wasn’t Chicago. It was America,” Daley says of 1968’s street riots, insisting the city’s torment could have happened anywhere.

It is his way of acknowledging the chaos without taking the blame for it, lines he has practiced for a year. Yet he managed to find common ground with former protest leader and California state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), swapping notes about life with Irish American fathers. While friends wonder whether a smoothly run convention next week finally will inter the old ghosts, Daley sees nothing to prove other than that the city can put on a good show.

“You do as much as possible,” he says, “and then live with it.”

Beyond the convention, Daley has set his sights on a more ephemeral and ambitious legacy--the resurrection of Chicago’s public schools, infamous as the worst-run system in the country. Alone among the nation’s mayors, Daley has been given virtual carte blanche by his state’s Legislature to take control of the system’s administration and budget.

Failure is a given. Reformers have been stymied for decades by brazen expenditures, insulated administrators, stubborn teachers unions and crumbling schoolhouses rife with gangs. But Daley sees the schools the way the city’s founders looked at the swamp that became Chicago--as a morass to build on.

Nearly 25,000 Chicagoans flee the city every year--an exodus Daley blames on the lack of faith in city schools. Daley should know. The mayor sent his own children to private Roman Catholic schools--a “family decision” that gives fodder to his critics. Yet it reinforces his belief that middle-class parents would stay in Chicago if they trusted their neighborhood schools.

“He’s absolutely right in his analysis that schools are the way to revitalize urban centers,” said Anthony Bryk, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for School Improvement. The research group monitors reforms that Bryk calls a “major reconstitution of the urban school system that no other city has started.”

Schools, not politics, make Rich Daley’s blood race. He has dispatched top aides to the schools’ administration, and though they are a long way from spiking up test scores, Bryk said, they have made strides. The budget is balanced. A four-year teachers contract has ended strikes that once paralyzed city campuses every fall. Acres of blacktop have given way to lawns. And Daley has extended his own conservative “values into the schools,” said historian Holli.

“We [had to] institute summer school? Homework? I had to make sure it wasn’t against a federal law,” Daley says, eyes rolling, his voice rising an octave in outrage.

Daley’s sputtering tirades erupt regularly in his fifth-floor City Hall office--a small room where he works at his father’s desk, facing a row of family photographs dominated by a giant framed portrait of the old Boss.

Nothing sets Daley off the way a recalcitrant federal official or a holier-than-thou politician can. When a Republican congressman accused him of grandstanding for the benefit of the nightly news during a private meeting on the crime bill in Washington several years ago, Daley turned crimson, then acidly asked the legislator: “You see any television cameras here?” There were none.

Daley can turn on a City Hall aide or a government worker in an instant if someone misses a deadline or fails to keep him up to date on a prized project. Heaven help the bureaucrat “who does something stupid or delays or says X and does Y,” says corporate lawyer William Daley, the mayor’s younger brother and closest confidant.

Impatience with bureaucrats is just part of Daley’s ample biological inheritance from his father. They share the same pale eyes, high-pitched chuckle and paunch (the son pedals a stationary bike every day to trim the doughy frame that gave his father his hated nickname of “Great Dumpling”). And Daley suffers from the same synaptic meltdown that turns simple declarative sentences into thickets of halting non sequiturs.

The elder Daley once burbled that his city was rising to “higher and higher platitudes.” The son’s own elliptical style rises as he grows excited. His desire to right the school system sets him off like a verbal Roman candle: “That’s why I was hitting the bushes, encouraging, you’re gonna give it to me? Okay, but I was like chopping at the block, I was, like, you know, drinking milk and eating a cookie, I wanted it so bad.”

Daley has the old man’s work ethic in his genes as well, making him a resident Mr. Fixit who uses his encyclopedic knowledge of the city to tutor department heads--or make them cower.

“He’s the best manager I’ve ever seen,” says Forrest Claypool, the aptly named parks commissioner who is one of the survivors. “He knows every inch of this city.”

Daley’s corporate approach to running the city government and his constant tinkering at privatizing municipal services have won allies among Chicago’s business leaders. When he asked corporate heads last year to help finance the convention, the response was immediate. More than 70 CEOs--65 of them Republicans--promised their firms would pony up $100,000 each.

“He manages just like one of us,” says Alger B. “Duke” Chapman, chairman of the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

Daley is most in his element out touring an alderman’s ward or scanning Chicago from the back seat of his black city-owned Lincoln Town Car. Where deputies yawn blankly at the passing scenery, Daley spies vacant firetraps, gaping potholes, trash mountains.

“He’s got X-ray vision,” said Alderman Burt Natarus, who has served on the City Council since the elder Daley’s final days. “It’s all in the details.”

Though the machine is dead and its spoils shrunken, Daley is as sure-footed as any political operative in town. He is well in control of the City Council, its tamed flock of 50 aldermen wearied by years of racial sniping, perpetually targeted by federal agents in search of corruption.

Critics say that Daley’s instincts are leaden, righted only by the savvy counsel of his brother--lionized as the most politically astute man in Chicago--and a bevy of clam-mouthed operatives. “People who deal with City Hall get this sense that the attitude there is ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ ” said William J. Grimshaw, a political scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology and an analyst of the city’s black political scene.

There is not much left for politicians of Rich Daley’s generation to barter. Court decrees unhinged the old patronage network, replacing the city’s spoils network with a more equitable hiring system. What remains is the “pinstripe patronage” that has become a staple of metropolitan life, largess that mayors can offer in the form of city contracts, new parks, school improvements, economic development grants.

“There’s no other game in town,” says Alderman Richard Mell, who fought Daley’s father as a reformer. For most aldermen, Daley’s ascendance came as blessed relief from the “Council Wars” of the 1980s, when white pols defied African American Mayor Harold Washington’s efforts to share the wealth among their long-protected wards and deprived black and Latino areas.

Daley has neutralized critics among black politicians by not backsliding on reform, by dispensing city work and contracts to black job-seekers.

Sanitation, graffiti-removal and demolition of abandoned buildings are as efficient in poor neighborhoods as in wealthier enclaves, says community activist Leavy.

But she and others say Daley has done little to restore the industrial base lost over the last three decades near the shellshocked high-rises on Chicago’s south and west sides. The city has gained about 6,000 jobs per year since 1993, but most new employment is downtown--and only after a bleak decade of loss, more than 200,000 jobs gone since 1976.

“You don’t see a hot button response from the city when a [neighborhood] company says they want to stay here,” Leavy says.

Poor wards get what they need, but getting what they want is an option reserved only for those on the mayor’s team. That roster was fairly bulging last year, when Daley won endorsements from dozens of black politicians and community leaders in his breeze to reelection.

The Rev. Herbert Martin, minister at Progressive Community Church in southwest Chicago and once Mayor Washington’s spiritual leader, was among a handful of ministers who sat on the sidelines. While not complaining about his community’s shake, Martin worries that the mayor has done little to heal racial animosity submerged beneath the city’s “calm waters.”

“There are serious problems that require people to sit down together, and there’s no leadership for that coming from City Hall,” Martin said.

It is a familiar litany, much the same that Boss Daley heard from such persistent critics as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s and ‘60s. Rich Daley comforts himself with the long view, suffering the attacks with more surface aplomb than the glacial contempt his father often revealed. The son sighs, clenches his mouth, reddens, shrugs.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” he says. “I have to bring the city together. People do this for political reasons. If you shout and yell, you don’t realize what’s happening.”

On the move through his city, Rich Daley rarely has to face shouters. There will be a few next week, among them “Treeman,” a homeless man dressed up as a sorry oak to protest Daley’s worrying “more about trees than people.”

But the son will move among his Chicagoans with ease, meeting them more easily than even his father did, unable to resist it when they sidle up from a crowd to salute: “Hey, Mare!”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Life Father, Like Son

Together, the City Hall terms of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and his father span five decades.

RICHARD J.

Mayoral term: 1955-76

Born: 1902

Education: Bachelor’s and law degrees, DePaul University

Career: Cook County clerk, 1950; county Democratic chairman, 1953

Family: Wife, Eleanor; seven children

RICHARD M.

Mayoral term: 1989-

Born: 1942