If it’s August, it must be CST, Chicago Stranded Time. You know them: a diverse band of scruffy youths sitting on the pavement up and down State Street holding up a worn cardboard sign: Stranded in Chicago, Please Help.’ Except they’re not.
The latest casualty in U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald’s long-overdue war on Chicago municipal graft, Shirley McMayon, made the classic Hogtown mistake. She assumed no one was watching, and she didn’t bother to launder the money.
42nd Ward Alderman Burt Natarus loves to cozy to local business interests. But when idling tour buses take over your neighborhood, you have to draw the line somewhere. Today I wrote Natarus to tell him so.
New Yorkers and Chicagoans both know they have a good thing going in their respective cities. So why do Chicagoans feel like they have to justify their city all the time?
Yours Truly having just filed a Wage Claim against a nonprofit English-as-a-Second-Language school in Pilsen, a former part-time employer, for pay deliberately and illegally withheld, I think it time to meditate on the best friend an Illinois hourly worker ever had–the Illinois Wage Payment and Collection Act.
You see them coming. You try to get away. But somehow you’re always ensnared. They surround you, guidebooks open and maps flailing in the wind, and ask you that dreaded question, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Navy Pier?’
Ok. Let’s get this all out of the way up front so that we can proceed to other topics. You know you want to know. You’ll be happier, I’ll be happier, Bertrand Goldberg will be happier. Answers to the most-asked questions about my humble abode, Marina City.