Archive for August 15th, 2010
Boystown Crime Update: August 2010
Yesterday, Althea was out with us for a while and asked us what the crime situation in Boystown was like these days, because she didn’t notice as many of the screaching, yelling, hooting, and hollering “youth” that had been plaguing Halsted for the last few years (ever since the Center on Halsted opened in 2007, and started actively recruiting these underaged troublemakers to come to Boystown so “they could have a safe place to hang out”, while terrorizing others).
This summer, crime in the neighborhood has been the lowest in years.
We attribute this to the following factors:
(1) Pie Hole Pizza Joint closed at the end of May 2010, right before the summer kicked into gear. While we loved Pie Hole, and miss the food, the staff, and even its owner Doug, the restaurant made a fatal business decision to operate as both a pizza shop and a latenight clubhouse/youth center for the troublemakers the Center was importing. When the Center closed at 10 or 11, these “youth” would head over to Pie Hole, and use its perch at Roscoe and Halsted as a staging ground for whatever trouble they intended to get up to that night. Fights would break out. Mobs of these underaged people would block the sidewalk, harrass residents and visitors, and generally make the neighborhood a place people wanting to spend money didn’t want to be. So, bars and restaurants suffered, and people who wanted to have a good time in Boystown went elsewhere because Pie Hole insisted on giving these “youth” a permanent clubhouse from which to cause criminal mischief. Well, with Pie Hole gone, there’s now nowhere for these “youth” to go at night. They are too young to go to the bars, and they have no money to spend in the restaurants, so after milling about on the sidewalk for a while, they get bored and go home…or elsewhere…but they don’t plague Boystown to the extent they did when Doug was playing youth outreach center. This is a very good thing.
(2) In combination with Pie Hole’s closing, a new business opened in a space next to Roscoe’s bar that was a vacant lot for many years. This is DS Tequila, which we have talked about, and is a new favorite spot of ours (great tacos, fun staff, and we can’t believe the people who run MiniBar own this too, because it’s like night and day in terms of how much we like the places). DS Tequila is built into the formerly abandoned building that was the Bad Boys clothing shop many years ago; DS also took over the vacant lot and made that into a very cool patio. The result was two-fold: a large stretch of space where the “youth” the Center attracted, and Pie Hole encouraged to be out late, no longer had a stoop to congregate on right there in the heart of Boystown…and at the same time more people actually spending money are being drawn to that stretch of real estate, so a business is chasing away the troublemakers before they can chase away customers. This is important because when it was an empty building, the “youth” would take up positions there, hoot and holler at passersby, and the police would not say anything to them because they are largely black, and in Chicago, in a Liberal neighborhood, black people are allowed to do whatever they please because criticizing them means you are a RAAACIST! So, people avoided that stretch of Halsted like the plague for the last few years, because they did not want to have to walk by a mob of these youth on the Bad Boys’ old steps, and be hooted, hollered, and yelled at by these thugs. DS Tequila opening removed this congregating spot, and now the “youth” don’t localize themselves at the Roscoe/Halsted instersection the way they did before.
(3) There’s also been a more visible police presence, as well as undercover off-duty cops hired by the Merchant’s Association to patrol the street. The cops ride those ATV vehicles up and down Halsted, and in several parking lots a police jeep is parked most nights, as a visual reminder to the thugs that their nonsense is being watched. The police let the nonsense carry on (see above), but it scares a lot of the “youth” enough that they don’t seem to be coming here to hang out anymore.
The only spot where there’s still a problem is in front of Spin nightclub right at Belmont and Halsted. Large throngs of these “youth” congregate there most nights, spitting at people walking by, yelling and screaching, and carrying on like fools. Spin attracts the just-turned-21 crowd, and regularly books bands and other acts that attract a wild mix of people, so maybe there’s always going to be a problem at that corner. At least it’s localized there, and not drawn deeper into Boystown the way it was when the Pie Hole Youth Center was up and running.
Althea thinks the Merchant’s Association needs to install those sonic noise machines that only younger people can hear, and blast those right at the Spin corner, to disperse the “youth” further.
We think the City needs to build an all-night rec center or something in the neighborhood these “youth” are coming from, so they have a safe place to play there, and they can leave people out spending money in Boystown alone. The businesses here need all the customers they can get, and the guys we know working in these bars and restaurants need every dollar in tips.
It’s not acceptable to harm businesses and their employees because the City does not want to seem politically incorrect for cracking down on thugs and hoodlums who are carrying on all night up and down the street — not spending any money — just because the perpetrators are black and black people are sacred pets in this town. If you are hooting and hollering and taking up the sidewalk with your antics, you should be chased away by the police no matter what color you are. Act appropriately. Learn to have a good time without negatively impacted the good time of others. Become people the neighborhood WANTS to have around, and you will be welcomed.
Add to the beauty, the fun, the vibrancy of the neighborhood…don’t behave in a way that makes people want to avoid one of the greatest parts of this city.
Maybe the City should invest in some youth counselors to work the strip at night, and talk to these “youth” and explain that their behavior is inappropriate. Maybe they really do need a kind of charm school to show them how to behave. It’s not a bad idea.
Do you know of anything that’s ever been attempted like this in other cities? Because if this has ever been done before, we’d love to know about it so we can suggest it at the next neighborhood police meeting.
Taking a new step: help us brainstorm people to interview for our "Nationality Expert" essay in the HillBuzz book
We’ve never taken that step to actively seek out people to interview for one of our essays. More often than not, things usually just fall into our laps, and the info we get for stories comes from events we are at, or what we acquire from nights out in Boystown, running into all the political people we know, or listening to the waiters and bartenders in Chicago spill everything they overheard at events they worked that week.
But, we’ve been talking about the phenomenon of “Nationality Experts” here in Chicago for some time (see yesterday’s take on it), and we find it to be a very interesting subject that highlights a couple of things:
* an aspect of life in Boystown
* differences between Chicago and other places we’ve all lived
* how much we love America, and the people who make us realize that on a daily basis
* the weird flavors of racism in this country
We know this is going to be a chapter in the HillBuzz book (already in progress), and we’d like to make that chapter as informative and interesting as possible.
So, maybe it’s time for us to step up and approach this like actual journalists, like the kind that used to exist many years ago, but are as sparce as smilodons in this the age of Ezra Klein and his JournoList (now rebranded CabaList, and cloaked once more in super-squirrel-secrecy).
Can you brainstorm in this thread people in Chicago we should try to interview for this essay?
It doesn’t have to be SPECIFIC people, like Suzy Smith at such and such, but what KINDS of people should we talk to and where should we find them?
What we’d like to do is talk to experts in various fields to get THEIR take on why this “Nationality Question” is asked in Chicago, why the people asking it ask it, and why they won’t accept “American” as an answer.
We’ve never seen anyone else out there in the world tackle this, so we’d like to get to the root of it.
Also, if anyone has the time today, we’d like someone to track down for us what President Theodore Roosevelt said on the subject of hyphenated-Americans. During the census, we think Michelle Malkin ran a bit criticizing people who parse themselves as half this, a quarter this, whatever, but we can’t find it (though we remember she referenced T.R. and something he said about how awful it is for people to say they are German-Americans, Hungarian-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc. We’re just Americans, no hyphenations should apply).
Can you also find any other good quotes from Founding Fathers or other American political or cultural figures on this subject?
Are there any good essays out there already talking about “Nationality Expertism”, one way or the other?
This is one of those things that just keeps happening to us, and it must be for some reason, and on some level we think the reason is that God wants us to write this essay…and with your help it could be one of the best we’ve ever done. And an important one, too, because one of the tools the Left uses to divide Americans (for Leftist conquest) is to put all those hyphens between us.
Maybe our role is to create a forceful shielf against this, and forge a perfect tool to smack back against the “Nationality Experts” — in Chicago, and at large.
Can you help with this?
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Longtime reader (and good friend) GarlicNose wrote in and asked us if there was a certain kind of person that is a “Nationality Expert” — ie, are the people who ask this idiotic question a certain ethnicity themselves.
Fascinatingly, there is a common thread with these people.
All of them are middle-class at best. None of them are professionals. Lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc. are not asking this question. They are usually people with “jobs” not “careers”.
We also notice these people are never what we would call well-read. They are the sort who, by their own admissions, watch a lot of reality TV.
The above does not make them bad people — and there’s nothing wrong with some reality TV — but what we are trying to communicate is that these are the people at a doctor’s office who would page through People or US magazine and not read Newsmax, National Geographic, or Vanity Fair. Most of them should be reading Highlights for Children, in our opinion.
In terms of the nationalities of these “Nationality Experts”, looking back on them, with the exception of just one or two, these people all do the following (almost without fail):
* when they encounter our “I’m American” response, they start rattling of their “nationality”, and it takes five fingers
* they all are at least a quarter this, a quarter that, a quarter something else, and a quarter of a last thing
This could be related to their little obession — the fact that they split themselves into quarters. Maybe there is an insecurity there, being this mix of these different things, and having to keep track of it all.
It must be exhausting, and that exhaustion leads them to become jackasses.
Garlic is really onto something that we didn’t think of before…because these people all really DO seem to share common traits before asking this same “Nationality Expert” question.
Sunday Open Thread: August 15th, 2010
What’s happening in your part of the country?
What are people you know talking about?
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Specifically, we’d love you to do a mini-poll of people in your circles and tell us what they are saying about the following two new Achilles’ heels for the Cult of Obama:
(1) Michelle Antoinette’s lavish spending and Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous vacation to Spain
(2) Dr. Utopia’s remarks Friday that he wants the Islamic Victory Mosque built at Ground Zero
These two things are going to do serious harm to the Administration and Democrats in general, but only if regular, shopping cart, drop the kids off at the park Americans are sickened enough by how out of touch the “president” and the current First Spouse are (and how they behave, spending our tax dollars).
First we want to see how deeply these issues have already penetrated, then we need to nudge things along and make sure every American has an opinion on the antics of these two people. And we doubt that opinion can be good.
