Sex on the grass

Nice June evening, man meets wife for light supper at Winberie's, at Oak Park's premiere corner, Oak Park & Lake.  Quiet, tasty, reasonable.  Man and wife exit Winberie's, cross Lake to Oak Park's premiere park, Scoville Park.  White kids playing frisbie.  "Look out, people," he hears as one player warns the others about pedestrians.  Man and wife take the pleasant walk up the small hill past the monument and various people lounging on the grass, including interracial couple with little kid.  Pleasant.

 

They enter the library, where he picks up How Capitalism Saved America: the Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, waiting for him on the reserve shelf.  He doesn't even have to go to the circ desk steps away, but checks it out electronically.  Upstairs she is chatting with the part-time librarian, #2 Daughter's first-grade teacher long ago, just retired from the elementary district.  He joins for chatting.  They conclude, look at videos.  He picks one, waits for her at the huge windows overlooking the park.  What he sees horrifies him.

 

A black boy is humping a black girl on the grass.  Both are clothed.  He is holding her down, as if in a wrestling move, bouncing up and down on her crotch.  She wraps her legs around him.  A second black boy lifts a light-skinned, perhaps white girl up from behind, puts her down on her feet.  She wants to get at the boy on the ground.  He prevents her.  She leaves the three, heading to a corner of the park 100 feet or so away where others are congregated.  The humping boy gets up after several minutes.  The humped girl gets up laughing, smoothes her hair, stands there.  He gets her now from behind, standing, and humps some more.

 

"Disgusting," says the wife, approaching the same window.

 

"Let's go," they say.

 

Outside, at the corner of the park mentioned before, a dozen to 15 black teens congregate at the benches, milling about with each other, talking and laughing.  The humping couple is part of this group.  This is the group’s corner.  Elsewhere in the park are kids and adults using the park for their quite different purposes.

Not Boring

No one will ever be bored by this board, By JIM BOWMAN in Wednesday Journal of OP&RF, June 07, 2006

DIFFICULT MEETING: Oak Park Trustee Martha Brock saved the day, or night, at the village board meeting a month ago when she and Trustee Elizabeth Brady changed their minds about who should lead the Colt building redo. Brady had explained herself reasonably enough: matters of substance had combined with matters of politics. There was nothing substantive to add when Brock’s turn came.

But speaking after Trustees Bob Milstein and Geoff Brady, she saved the situation. The other two had called out an editor, a political opponent who had addressed the board, and fellow trustees in a remarkable display of pique, disappointment, and veiled or unveiled animosity, chilling the room, or at the least the one where I sat watching on TV.

Brock rambled a bit but did not hesitate. She got personal but not maudlin and not angrily defensive. Like an earlier speaker, she spoke of resigning. But she accused no one. It was not a masterpiece of argument but a candid, apparently guileless display that cooled things down. She finished, the meeting proceeded, business was completed, everybody went home.

HISTORICAL PRECEDENT: The affair was all about backing into a meat grinder. The butcher’s wife did that. The result was predictable: Disaster. So did our bold if misguided Board Majority back into a public opinion meat grinder. The result? Temporary setback apparently viewed as disaster. Two defected, leaving two others disturbing the ether with ineffectual haymakers.

But all four may take grim consolation from Oak Park political history. Officeholders and staff have had to swallow some bitter medicine over the years. At a hot District 97 board meeting a long time ago, a disgruntled parent asked a board member to step outside. (He didn’t.)

When the library board tried to close a branch, people demanded otherwise. The Village Manager Association, still chewing dust from the last election, lost a much earlier one over the firing of a garbage man. A lawsuit did the same for a hard-charging school board. Former officeholders have left town. You need insulation from the slings and arrows.

LANDMARK ALERT: Meanwhile, Oak Park’s Historic Preservation Commission convenes with statutory authority to declare your building a landmark with all the benefits and liabilities that includes—whether you like it or not.

That’s what Trustee Greg Marsey learned at the May 15 board meeting, where the 400 North Maple block condo development was discussed. Marsey asked and got it verified by Village Attorney Ray Heise, who admitted the coercion written into village ordinance—no, the owner cannot decline landmark status—only after noting that the owner is invited to participate in landmark discussions.

Marsey appeared stunned. President David Pope, trying to wrap up discussion, said he did not want to get into "nuance" at that point. But one man’s nuance is another’s heart of the matter. Someone can start the process for you the owner? And in the end you have to go along with commission and board decision, with drastic implications as to what you can do with your own property? You have in mind neither whorehouse nor shooting gallery nor saloon, but a spanking new building with toilets that work, but it doesn’t matter, or might not matter.

There was more. So clearly was the board moving to stop the Maple Avenue development that Trustee Baker volunteered on the spot to mediate in the matter of developer vs. NIMBY neighbors. He would recuse himself from voting when its landmark status came before the board, he offered, presenting himself as a neutral third party who would bring developers and neighbor to agreement.

But elected officials normally recuse themselves only when past activity indicates conflict, and they do it regretfully. They don’t do it ahead of time so as to adopt a new role that an official considers more important than the one he was elected to fill. Milstein dissuaded Baker from his bad idea, though without saying how bad it was.

Look out, here comes the village board

Something going on here we should know about?

The [OP village] board tabled the discussion on the zoning change until the end of the meeting, when it entered into a closed-door discussion citing "attorney-client privilege," which is not one of the 23 "strictly construed" exceptions that allow public bodies to meet in private.

When the board returned to open session at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, [President David] Pope explained the board’s position before a unanimous 6-0 vote to direct the village attorney to prepare a "findings of fact" on down-zoning the block. Trustee Greg Marsey left the meeting before the vote was taken.

The findings of fact would replace those prepared by the [village] Plan Commission in its recommendation to deny the zoning change from R-7 to R-6, which is a more restrictive and less dense residential zoning designation. The change, if it were to affect the planned condo building, would lower the four-story building by one floor and reduce its 11 units to nine.

Plan Commission, butt out.  Meanwhile, historic preservation took a hit when the relevant village commission denied landmark status to two buildings on the 400 N. Maple block

Commissioners expressed sympathy with preserving examples of more pedestrian architectural styles and with the neighbors’ plight in trying to prevent the character of their neighborhood from changing. However, most of the commissioners at the meeting found that the buildings are too badly dilapidated to retain historic architectural characteristics.

Falling-down buildings need not apply.  But landmarking the third would stop or slow down the condo development.  Neighbors are looking for “cultural”-historical reasons to save it — as if their interest was piqued in the first place by issues of crowding and making their block less livable or at least less cozy.

Meanwhile, the developer has made his plans under the wild assumption that zoning on books matters.

[Bob] Allen said he’s already spent a lot of money getting the project ready to be built, having not held back because he intended to build within allowable zoning.

But he faces a zoning change after the fact:

For weeks, Village Attorney Ray Heise has told the board that any zoning changes made now would not apply to a project for which a building permit application was received prior to the change.

Monday night, Pope would only say that the applicability of the zoning change, if approved, would be "subject to internal operating procedures of the village, village codes and state laws."

Which with $1.50 or so will get you a Green Line ride downtown or even to the South Side.  You can trust this village board as far as you can throw it. 

Trustees Geoff Baker and Robert Milstein were the most vocal in pushing the board to consider setting aside the Plan Commission to deny the zoning change request.

"I’m not going to sit by and let inappropriate zoning affect anybody," Baker said.

Milstein said the board needed "to send a new message in Oak Park that historic homes and peoples’ neighborhoods will be protected."

In other words, we can change that law if we want.  Or, to paraphrase the Red Queen, words mean what I want them to mean, period.

Crime and punishment

Tough, bold, smart Oak Park police catch a bad guy.  Breaking news from Wed. Journal:

A suspect in the rape and armed robbery of several woman in River Forest accidentally shot himself in the head during a police chase Monday night in Oak Park. The suspect died several hours later

Cops had him in the dark in Mills Park, but he

might have slipped through were it not for the instincts of off duty Oak Park detective Sgt. Juan Paladines. Paladines, who was driving in the area in his personal car, turned on his police radio when he heard the commotion. He then parked near Home Avenue at Washington Boulevard and waited. Within a minute Paladines spotted Patillo crouching behind a garbage can. When Patillo started moving south bound on Home, Paladines exited his car and followed him, radioing his position and asking for assistance. 

 

Rookie Oak Park officer Stephen Struska was the first to arrive on the scene, and joined Paladines in the foot pursuit in the 400 block of Home.

 

Struska passed Paladines, and was about to reach out and grab Patillo, Scianna said, when Patillo pulled a hand gun. He attempted to point it over his shoulder and shoot Struska. Unfortunately for Patillo, he fired too soon, and shot himself in the side of the head.

Wow.