The Secret Ward of Chicago Newsletter - April 25, 2024
In Which We Discuss More Renderings Done By Rich People Who Want Our Money Because Apparently They Don't Have Any Other Goddamn Hobbies
From the Desk of Alderman Cosgrove Garibaldi, Proper Appropriator of Funds and Non-Puppeted Eldest Son of the Noble House Garibaldi, as loosely dictated to Ward Director of Communications and Person With a Barely Functioning Memory But Still You Know Enough To Remember What People Say In Their Mayoral Campaigns, Kevin Sciretta
The fox trots, and the rat’s hole is lifted, and bears pray to a god they hope will be kind to them in the form of football victories and public money for unnecessary building projects as this week, Chicago uses things vaguely associated with the animals to show that business and government have both gone bah-noos-noos.
Hi neighbors welcome to today’s newsletter. This is another one where we’re going to look out into rest of the Chicagosphere, because again public money is being asked for to build things we don’t need, and it is our duty to point at the people asking for it and say “Who woke up and took the brain out of your fucking head.”
We’ll discuss, primarily, a press conference held by the Chicago Bears football team unveiling their proposal for a new stadium on Chicago’s lakefront. There are renderings. You can imagine how that will go.
Huzzah.
Plus the Rathole was taken and bunch of stores closed. Condolences.
TRAFFIC & TRANSPORTATION
The Tunnel That Was the Kennedy Expressway
The Tunnel That Was The Kennedy Expressway was not included in any renderings that will be referred to later in this post because it would never be involved with something that low rent and embarrassing. The Tunnel That Was the Kennedy Expressway learned it’s lesson from the time it agreed to be part of preliminary sketches for the proposal to make Branham Tower lay flat and rotate. That was a dark time for everyone
Magenta Line Riders
The Magenta Line was also not included in any renderings referenced later because no public transit was included in those renderings at all! The renderings make the only way of accessing this new football wonderland appear to be Lake Michigan itself, so unless you’re one of those boat-dorks who likes to clog the waterways with proof that you dodge taxes AND cheat on your wife, you’re SOL when trying to get to the Pigskin Palace of Achievement.
Speaking of.
BUSINESS UPDATE
Under No Circumstances Are We Giving the Chicago Bears Billions of Tax Dollars
In football, the quarterback is the guy who throws the football. He does more, but, for simplicity’s sake, when you see a guy in highlights and he’s throwing the main ovoid sphere in question with various degrees of success, that’s the quarterback. The quarterback is extremely important, maybe the most important position in all of sports, because so much of the game is controlled by him. Despite this, the Chicago Bears have historically signed people to play that position that are, well, terrible at it.
Like, remember when, as a Ward, we couldn’t get a good Forestwatcher? The person who’s only job is to sit in the Foresthouse on the edge of Yamamoto Forest Preserves and let us know when the giant red eyes appear? This is before we knew how to appease it with old appliances and gift cards. Remember when everyone we hired just stunk?
One lady thought the eyes were always there. The guy after her would answer radio calls with “all clear…wait…”, then silence. The couple that came after him just took off all their clothes and walked into the woods?
The Bears, in terms of the quarterback position have been like that, but somehow worse. They’ve been so bad it’s really a surprise that when given the ball, none of these QBs have sat down mid-game and tried to eat it. This year though, through a combination of luck and, honestly, a significant degree of skill, the Bears and general manager Ryan Poles have maneuvered themselves into position to select first in a draft of college football players, one of the main methods by which NFL teams attain new talent.
The draft itself is horrifyingly antiquated, severely anti-labor and hyped to the point of migraine, but that’s another tale for another time.
This pick allows them the chance to draft Caleb Williams, a quarterback who played most recently at that bastion of free expression the University of Southern California. He is projected to be, as a pro, very very very good. Fortune-changing good. He’s a personable, outgoing young man with a dynamic presence on the field, making him the opposite of the rest of the Bears’ history of quarterback-shaped throw-mulch (apologies to last year’s QB Justin Fields, who was done very wrong by his team.)
This is what everyone should be talking about. They aren’t because on Wednesday the Bears, alongside Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, held a press conference announcing their proposal for a new stadium on the lakefront to replace their current perfectly fine stadium, also on the lakefront, that will require…say it with me….
…public money.
This is all of course following the boondoggle that continues to be the Chicago White Sox baseball team and their March on Tax Dollars, telling everyone THEY don’t like THEIR perfectly good stadium and that they NEED one on the river! For reasons! Shut up!
They said this and then the MLB season began, and this team has so far played 24 games, of which they have won? Three.
THREE. ONE WIN FOR EACH BILLION DOLLARS THEY ASKED FOR.
Yeah, they were threatening Chicago with moving the team to Nashville, while the whole time they’d put together a roster of players that play baseball like they look out at the field everyday and say “oooohhhh BASEball”. Fucking lunacy.
When I say the Bears had a press conference, it was more of a tent revival/snake-oil pitch. It began with a prayer, included some dazzling pap, and ended with most of the crowd mad, except for a few plants and the truly rube’d. The worst part about it is that the Uber-Rube, the Rube By Which All Things Scam Are Possible, appears to be our very own mayor, Brandon Johnson. Because cities are not allowed to have good mayors.
Reminder: Brandon Johnson is the REGULAR Chicago Mayor. NOT the Shadow Mayor.
Johnson became Regular Mayor through the Chicago Mayoral Election, an arcane and esoteric ritual that ends, I believe, with having 13 under-qualified lunatics run full speed at City Hall’s smallest revolving door, and whichever two are spit out first then keep running until one of them falls into a hole that says “Mayor”. I think that’s what it means to “run for mayor”.
The Shadow Mayor, of course, is plucked from a place in space and time, then spat back out into our reality with no memory of their time in office, but with a sash that says “Shadow Mayor”. The process has given us the Shadow Mayors we’ve needed so far, we think, and none of them have been members of a teacher’s union who espoused progressive policy to the point of being called a socialist, only then turn into a sock puppet for a sports executive who moved here six years ago. About him.
Under previous leadership the Bears had purchased land on a former horse racing track in a place called “Arlington Heights”, which sounds made up, like “Indiana” which we know for a fact is not real. The assumption then, was that the Bears would build a new stadium on that land, move from the lakefront, keep the word “Chicago” in their name because who cares, and then the whole thing would be done. But then the Bears and the family that owns them, the Midwest Tessier-Ashpools known as the McCaskeys, hired new team president Kevin Warren, who’s superpower seems to be that he’s, I don’t know, annoying? I don’t want to be unfair, he’s clearly very qualifed for this job, but…yeah he’s fucking annoying.
He’s the kind of extrovert that tells you about how early in the morning he gets up and how much he loves to work and says things like “legacy” and “purpose” until you finally ask “Are you going to kill me?” That’s annoying. More annoying is that this schtick has apparently worked on Brandon Johnson, who has now gone from accused-comrade to honorary Bears executive, and decided the city should be on the hook for part of the cost of a new stadium that should be 100 percent on the Bears.
One of the things that Warren has Jim Henson Workshop’d the Regular Mayor into saying is that this has to happen because fans in Chicago don’t want Chicago to lose the Bears, even if it’s to “Arlington Heights”. This is, as they say in intellectual circles, bullshit. Football teams often play just outside the city that has their name. The San Francisco 49ers play in Santa Clara, California, which is a different place. The Dallas Cowboys play in Arlington, Texas. Again, a different place. The New York Giants and the New York Jets play in NEW JERSEY.
WHICH IS A DIFFERENT.
STATE.
All of those teams still have rabid fans.
Basically, I hate this for everybody. I hate this for the city and the Wards because we’re clearly being used as a negotiating tactic against the fictional “Arlington Heights” in a bid to get tax breaks by a football team that wins a meaningful game once every 700 years. It sucks for voters because Brandon Johnson ran for Mayor on a rock-ribbed progressive platform only to get aw shucks’d by Kevin Warren into being further exposed as being completely out over his skis. And it sucks for Bears fans.
Their team is in on the cusp of drafting a quarterback who is projected to be a very very very good professional, propelling them to better and more entertaining games. When on the verge of rocketing into The Good Times, they watch the organization they love use the prelude to go for The Swindle.
The Bears are terminally bizarre, and not in the fun “guy at the end of the bar that is somehow still legally allowed to smoke inside” way. They are terminally bizarre and will stay that way forever, and now we will have to deal with them constantly, because they have hired a person to lead them who has paired that bizarreness with religiosity and political acumen. And I live here, in a place beyond consensus reality. If I think you’re weird, you’re a true fucking goof, and the fact that the Regular Mayor thinks they’re great means he’s no help.
I hope they do build their new lakefront stadium. And then I hope it floats away.
AND all this the week they hauled away the Rathole! They declared the street “damaged” and went and pulled up the section of concrete it was on. They took a cathedral away from the faithful. And for what? The Rathole never asked you to spend public money on digging it up. It never asked anything, because it was an indent in the street made by a rat who then ran away, not realizing it had started a religion.
Free the Rathole.
PUBLIC SAFETY
Don’t Ask People for Billions of Dollars
Don’t! Don’t do it! This is a repeat, but it apparently bears repeating, no pun intended but also not apologized for!
Asking a group of people for billions of dollars for something a fraction of them care about is, in fact, rude. It’s rude! And when you’re rude, you’re making the public unsafe. Just like you make the public unsafe by taking their money away from schools, roads, water lines, parks, bridges, tunnels, convention centers, the arts god forbid they get a fucking crumb without a hissy fit, libraries that are actively preserving the history and culture of our society, and social services, to give to a team that again, hasn’t won a playoff game since a Daley was Mayor.
A Regular Mayor, I mean.
EVENTS & ACTIVITIES
It’s the First Annual You Can’t Have Billions of Dollars Fest, celebrating the fact that you can’t have billions of dollars! You just can’t! No individual should, and a community should not have to raise it collectively to give to anything other than creating an urban utopia within the rickety framework of last-stage capitalism.
Everyone is invited, especially anyone who is currently asking for billions of dollars to build a fucking football field. The festival takes place wherever I am! Come up and ask me for billions of dollars!
I’ll say no! Every goddamn time.
ADDRESS YOUR ALDERMAN
This week’s Address YOUR Alderman comes from me, Kevin Sciretta, directly from this chair.
Kevin says:
The Super Bowl is a big deal. It happens every year and takes over the city that it’s played in and allegedly generates a ton of the mysterious spice known as “Revenue”. Part of the Big Sell on the The New Bears Lakeside Eden is that the sugarwater of this monstrosity will finally attract the hummingbird that is he Super Bowl to Chicago, from which the Revenue Dams will burst and the precious material will flow into every home.
Thing is the Super Bowl happens once a year. And never in the same city in consecutive years. In fact in the last 14 years the Super Bowl has been hosted by 14 different cities. What’s the Mayor’s plan to get the Super Bowl played here every year, twice a year, in violation of everything we know about the Super Bowl, in order to justify the public expenditure he’s asking for?
Also why are my garbage cans floating?
Thanks Kevin! Fun Stuff!
This concludes your Secret Ward of Chicago newsletter for Thursday, April 25, 2024. We’d like to thank the Garibaldi niece Constantina for laughing openly at the pictures of this new stadium, our Ward staff and volunteers for burying their liquid assets after Wednesday’s press conference and the Office of the Shadow Mayor, for not being the Regular Mayor.
We’d like to thank you for your attention and remind you, if you received this email…
…no you didn’t.
Maintaining the secrecy of the Ward is more important than ever. Not because I think we’re in any danger of voluntarily giving extra money to the Bears or Ward forbid trying to build a stadium for them here. I just don’t want the Bears or the Regular Mayor to find out we’re here, then try to come talk to us about it. Oh that would be death. We have our spies, guys. They’ll tell us what’s up. Stay…right where you are.
Anyway, once read, the suggested method of disposal for this newsletter is, as always, sitting it next to me after a press conference where a local sports teams reveals the Regular Mayor to be a full-fledged marionette, because I’m going to talk about that press conference to the point that the newsletter gets up and walks as far away as possible.
Enjoy the weekend everyone!
Long Live Secrecy, Long Live the Magenta Line, and Long Live the Secret Ward.
Numquam Aeternus
The Secret Ward Staff
Get to Know YOUR Ward:
Aldermen: Did you know you can call your alderman? Or email them? There are even Ward Offices where you can go and talk to the staff, or shock of shocks the alderman themselves. Even if you didn’t vote for them! You can express any view or opinion to them you’d like. A lot of the worst people in your Ward already are! I guarantee it.
Chances are you are not one of those worst people. Probably the inverse. You can tell your alderman exactly what you’re willing to spend your tax money on. And what you don’t.
Enjoy that knowledge.
“I think every city should have a giant building on their lakefront that looks a like an Autobot that died mid-transformation. JK could you imagine?” - Daniel Burnham