What does it take for people to take the dangers of hot weather seriously? To recognize it as a killer? Heat kills more people in America than all other natural disasters — tornadoes, floods, earthquakes — combined. Yet we still treat heat waves as if they were an inconvenience.
Compare the tone of your local newscasters when a heat wave is about to descend and when a blizzard is about to hit. In the latter, you’re likely to hear, “The region is bracing for a major winter storm which could paralyze commuters …” But the former is more likely to produce something like “It’s a hot one out there, so head for the beach or turn on the air conditioner.” Meteorologists usually warn asthmatics or heart patients if the air quality is “unhealthful,” but programming is never interrupted in heat waves the way it is for a hurricane or a winter nor’easter.
There are almost no program breaks for heat advisories the way there are even for severe thunderstorms. In the midst of brutally cold winter weather, no one would ever argue that heating people’s homes is a luxury. But during extended periods of hot, humid weather, when the very acts of walking and breathing become not just a misery but unhealthy, when for some people the mildest exertion risks hospitalization or even death, we still talk about those “lucky enough” to have air conditioning as if air conditioning were a luxury.
It’s different in places like the tropics or the Middle East, where people are used to the constant fact of extreme heat and have found ways to cope with it. In America, despite the effects of global warming, heat waves are still a break from the norm. I suspect that heat waves trigger a response that’s deep in the American character, the impulse to stop complaining, buck up and get on with things. How, though, can ordinary life go on when people are forced to live in meteorological conditions so perilous that they begin breaking the body down after 48 hours of exposure?
And since we largely judge the destructiveness of a natural disaster in terms of media images, how can a heat wave — which does not lay obvious waste to the concrete, physical environment — compete with the damage left behind by hurricanes or tornadoes, earthquakes or floods, even the transformation of the landscape that happens in a snowstorm? Streets aren’t impassable, buildings aren’t falling down, you can still get from one place to another. What’s the big deal?
Getting us to think seriously about heat is just one of the aims of Eric Klinenberg’s trenchant and persuasive new book “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.” The disaster that Klinenberg, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University, refers to is the heat wave that laid waste to Chicago for eight days in July 1995. Higher temperatures in the upper atmosphere trapped humid air in the city, leaving it no place to dissipate.
The heat index (how hot it feels to your body — the heat equivalent of the wind-chill factor) hit 126 degrees (indoors, the actual temperature — not the index — hit 120). The physical damage — buckled pavement, bridges that had to be hosed down to prevent them from locking when plates expanded, cars that broke down in the street, a power generator that burst into flame, the loss of water pressure and even water to some neighborhoods where kids had opened fire hydrants — was nothing next to the human toll. By the time the heat wave lifted, 739 Chicagoans had died.
We’re not talking about an era before air conditioning. We’re talking about a modern American city, seven years ago. To put this in perspective, Klinenberg tells us that that’s more than twice the number who died in the great Chicago fire of 1871, and more than 20 times the number who died in Hurricane Andrew. And it tops the casualties of the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800 combined.
In terms of lives lost, the 1995 Chicago heat wave was one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in recent American history. Yet how many of you outside of Chicago have even heard of it? I certainly hadn’t before reading Klinenberg’s book. And part of the reason for that lies in the way we think about heat, a line of thinking reflected in the judgment of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and many of his city officials that the heat wave was an act of God, and that the deaths were unavoidable. However, an even more ominous attitude than simple complacency about hot weather was in effect during the deadly ’95 heat wave: It was a classic case of how deciding to run a city like a corporation can put citizens’ lives in danger.
Klinenberg is not arguing that governments should be held responsible for nature. He is arguing that they must be made accountable for their response to natural disaster, that “act of God” excuses allow the culpable to escape responsibility. He is also arguing that it isn’t enough to evaluate social services in terms of how they perform in ordinary circumstances, but on their capacity to perform under extraordinary conditions, especially when they don’t respond adequately even though they have the resources they need.
What makes “Heat Wave” such an essential book at this moment in American politics is that, using the 1995 heat wave as his paradigm, Klinenberg has written a forceful account of what it means to be poor, old, sick and alone in the era of American entrepreneurial government. Richard M. Daley’s father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, was the king of Chicago machine politics. His son, touting the new idea that government should be run as a business — which is to say at a profit — epitomizes the death of his father’s way of running things. Or to put it in its bluntest terms: Old man Daley was a bully who used his police force to beat people bloody in the streets during the 1968 Democratic Convention. His son, in the new era of government efficiency, presided over policies that killed Chicagoans in their homes. Klinenberg sees his book as a story of hubris and shortsightedness. But it’s hard to put down “Heat Wave” without believing you’ve just read what’s described in the book as a tale of “slow murder by public policy.”
The city’s response to the heat wave was one of those nightmares that teeters on the verge of being a sick joke. Robert Scates, a deputy chief paramedic who monitored emergency services on Chicago’s South Side (home to large numbers of the city’s black and poor) realized that a crisis was at hand. His paramedics were working 26- to 28-hour shifts in 100-degree heat, going from one call to another without returning to their base firehouse. Scates called his superior, as well as the chief paramedic and the deputy fire commissioner of emergency services, to persuade them to institute a recall of all personnel who were not working at the time, and to put in a call to the suburbs for more ambulances. The chief paramedic relayed a message to Scates from the deputy commissioner: Stop being “paranoid.” The deputy commissioner refused on three separate occasions to honor Scates’ request.
The Chicago Fire Department includes both firefighters and paramedics, though firefighters outnumber paramedics seven to one and, in 1995, were overwhelmingly represented in the department’s top positions, paying little attention to paramedics’ request for more resources. The average waiting time for an ambulance in Chicago was seven minutes, though 20 was not unusual. During the heat wave, the wait stretched anywhere from 30 to (in one instance) over 70 minutes. This is hardly a matter of cost, since the Fire Department, according to Scates, routinely refuses to spend 5 percent of its allotted budget. Coming in underbudget, even if it puts citizens at risk, allows management to look fiscally responsible and to curry favor with City Hall.
In 1995, the Fire Department had no system for monitoring either the number of calls or the nature of them. During the heat wave, hospitals were so overwhelmed with patients that at one time or another, 23 of them had to close their doors to new admissions. At one point, 18 hospitals were closed. But there was no system in place to inform paramedics as to which hospitals could receive new patients, so people in need of dire care (heatstroke can be arrested if a patient receives immediate attention, usually by rehydration and lowering the body temperature with ice packs) were shuttled from one hospital to another. Or another. Or another. The fact that a majority of the city’s hospitals are located in the more affluent North Side, thus further isolating the poor who live on the West and South Sides from immediate care, meant that desperately sick people went even longer without treatment.
Obviously, many of those people died. But even in death, the bureaucracy let them down. So many bodies came into the medical examiner’s office that eventually nine refrigerated meat trailers had to be set up in the parking lot to house the corpses. With the city’s 56 ambulances overworked, police had to transport bodies to the morgue (many in a state of decomposition), where they often had to wait an hour and a half to file their paperwork, thus delaying them from answering calls about elderly neighbors who had not been seen in a few days. The city finally offered parolees the opportunity to cut their parole time if they volunteered to move bodies.
If this story has any heroes, Edmund Donoghue, the city’s chief medical examiner, is one. Mayor Daley (whose initial public comment on the heat wave was “It’s hot … It’s very hot, but let’s not blow it out of proportion … we go to extremes in Chicago. And that’s why people like Chicago”), concerned with maintaining the perception that he was a good “manager” who had made Chicago economically efficient while still providing services (and not wanting anything to ruin his coup of luring the Democratic National Convention back to the city in 1996), publicly cast doubt on Donoghue’s numbers. “Every day,” he said, “people die of natural causes. You cannot claim that everybody who has died in the last eight or nine days dies of heat. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat.”
Resisting immense political pressure from Daley, Donoghue stuck to his guns and insisted that no one who died during the heat wave had died from anything but the heat, an opinion that was later affirmed by medical examiners around the country and by epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Daley’s response was to order the Health Department commissioner not to release the numbers of the dead.
Throughout the crisis and when faced with the study the city released afterward, Daley’s response was a remarkable blend of political expediency and callousness. He and his officials insisted that the government could not be blamed for the heat. Many in the press, including editorial writers at the Chicago Tribune, took the same tone.
But of course, no one was blaming Daley for the heat. Rather, they were questioning the city’s response to a crisis. Eager to paint it as anything but the failure of his administration, Daley attempted to shift the blame to Commonwealth Edison for losing power during the heat wave, and he promised to investigate the utility company.
But Daley’s buck-passing seems like small potatoes next to that of his cronies. Klinenberg gives an account of a press conference where one public official after another took to the microphones to lie — as Fire Commissioner Raymond Orozco did when he said his department “was not overwhelmed by the heat wave” — or to blame the victims — as Human Services Commissioner Daniel Alvarez did when he said of the dead, “We’re talking about people who die because they neglect themselves. We did everything possible. But some people didn’t want to even open their doors to us.”
For Klinenberg, Alvarez’s quote is key. On the surface, “Heat Wave” appears to be a piece of sociological reporting on a total civic breakdown. The horror of the story Klinenberg tells here, though, is that the Chicago city government operated exactly as a government is intended to operate when it’s following the entrepreneurial model.
When saving money takes precedence over providing adequate services, even in an emergency, then we can no longer expect government to do the basic job of saving the lives of citizens in danger. The city health commissioner, Sheila Lyne, perfectly expressed the city’s attitude toward the inability of its overwhelmed emergency services to respond to calls when she said, “it wasn’t going to matter … I think the people were going to die anyway.”
But as Chief Medical Examiner Donoghue had initially said, there has never been any scientific evidence to suggest that the victims would have died of anything other than the heat. However, Lyne and other proponents of “government as business” can give thanks that, to borrow a line from Ebenezer Scrooge, the dead at least had the grace to decrease the surplus population.
The entrepreneurial government, Klinenberg explains, replaces the idea of government’s sacred obligation to care for its citizens (and the care he’s talking about includes such basics as emergency medical services, that is, adequate police, fire and paramedic personnel) with a model in which people are expected to act as informed consumers. The trouble, as Klinenberg notes, is that the people most in need of those services — the old, the sick, those who have outlived family and friends — are often the least able to access the information they need.
The victims of the heat wave were overwhelmingly poor, old, sick and alone. Equal numbers of blacks and whites died, but blacks died at a higher rate. To illustrate his point, Klinenberg offers a picture of two adjoining neighborhoods: North Lawndale, which suffered some of the heaviest casualties, and Little Village, where the toll was not nearly so pronounced.
Alvarez’s description of the people who “didn’t want to even open their doors to us” might apply to the residents of North Lawndale. A once-busy section where the original Sears Tower and businesses like Western Electric had provided jobs, North Lawndale saw a precipitous decline when those businesses moved out and many residents followed suit. Today the area is a mass of overgrown vacant lots whose tall grass provides cover to the drug dealers doing business there.
The residents, often old people who have “aged in place” — that is, stayed in the neighborhoods where they lived while their friends and family in the neighborhood have either died or moved — are afraid to open their doors to strangers. They are often afraid to go out on the street. When fear is a permanent condition of life, as Klinenberg points out, the social structures that create a true neighborhood — the businesses that provide for, in Jane Jacobs’ phrase, “eyes on the street;” neighbors who aren’t afraid to visit one another or sit on their stoops; churches that link people to a social circle — can’t exist. And since police in Chicago are not assigned to patrol areas in quantities that take account of the crime rate, the cops who work North Lawndale often have shifts that are strings of arrests with no chance to develop ties with the community or to get to know the residents’ routines.
Little Village has approximately the same poverty rate as North Lawndale. But this predominately Latino area has a thriving business district (including street vendors) that allows for busy, and thus safer, street life. Moreover, the area’s stability and ability to provide jobs have meant that generations of the same families often live close to each other. Klinenberg’s account suggests that even the Little Village residents who have “aged in place” are not cut off from their neighbors. And because they feel safe walking the streets, going to church or to the markets, they don’t live in isolation.
“Heat Wave” is not the easiest book to read. As befits his discipline, Klinenberg uses sociological jargon that isn’t always graceful or concise. But the occasional clumsiness of his language is small potatoes next to his compassion, his reason, his refusal to demonize even the most foolish people here and his insistence that the deaths in Chicago were rooted in government’s abandonment of responsibility and in the breakdown of the social structures that keep people in touch with their neighbors and communities.
Klinenberg is too gentlemanly to pat himself on the back even when he could. His analysis of how the Chicago media handled the story, how they relied on those in power for their information and thus parroted official “wisdom,” and his understanding of the way the news cycle continuously drops developing stories in favor of new ones, suggests why the story of the 1995 heat wave had to be written by a sociologist. (For example, the Chicago media regularly talked about the “debate” over what caused the deaths. But there was no debate: There was scientific fact and there were Mayor Daley’s efforts to cover his ass.)
Klinenberg doesn’t offer solutions, though a few basic ones seem obvious. If we believe that one of the functions of housing is to give people shelter from the elements, then in areas subject to severe heat, air conditioners should be considered as necessary to health and safety as heat or smoke detectors are, and landlords should be required to provide units that meet a standard of efficient performance (costlier to buy, cheaper to use). Congress should be pressured to restore funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which would help seniors and the sick afford to use air conditioning. (Some of the dead actually had units but, subsisting on a fixed income, couldn’t afford to turn them on.) While hundreds were dying in Chicago during that week in 1995, the Republican-controlled Senate was pushing to scrap the program, but settled for cutting $100 million from its budget.
But even those measures won’t address what Klinenberg sees as the crisis of isolation that affects so many city residents, a crisis that will only be exacerbated as the idea of government as business, regardless of the human cost, becomes further entrenched. During the upheavals of the ’60s, politicians in big cities used to talk with trepidation each spring of the long hot summer ahead. “Heat Wave” shows how, in the name of governmental efficiency, one group of politicians rode out a long, hot summer while conveniently ignoring the corpses piling up at their door.
CHICAGO (AP) — Thousands of nurses and other protesters planned to rally at a downtown Chicago plaza Friday ahead of a two-day NATO summit and as a prelude to a much larger demonstration expected this weekend.
Meanwhile, many office buildings in the usually bustling city were closed after workers were warned to stay home because of heightened security, snarled transportation and the possibility of unruly protests.
National Nurses United officials have said they expect about 2,000 nurses to attend Friday’s rally, where they will call for a “Robin Hood” tax on financial institutions’ transactions to offset cuts in social services, education and health care. City officials expect the rally to draw more than 5,000 because of a performance by former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, an activist who has played at many Occupy events.
In a sign of the building tension, lawyers for protesters said Chicago police, with their guns drawn, raided an apartment building where activists were staying and arrested nine people on Wednesday night. The Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild said officers broke down doors in the building in the South Side Bridgeport neighborhood and produced no warrants.
“The nine have absolutely no idea what they’re being charged with because they were not engaged in any criminal activity at all,” said guild attorney Sarah Gelsomino. “They’re really very confused and very frightened.”
The Chicago Police Department refused to comment. Gelsomino said a bond hearing was scheduled for noon Friday.
Chicago was originally going to host the G-8 economic summit too, and the nurses’ rally was initially intended to coincide with that. But the G-8 summit was moved to Camp David, Md. Midwest Director Jan Rodolfo said the nurses decided to go forward with the rally in the hope that their message would reach a worldwide audience.
“What we really hope for is a large, festive, hopeful, constructive tone regarding the Robin Hood tax and that everyone in attendance feels like they’re part of a moment in history,” Rodolfo said. She said the movement has much more momentum in other countries and “we’re hoping to put it on the map” in the U.S.
Early Friday, the U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command planned to hold training flights with F-16s and other military aircraft over downtown Chicago in preparation for securing the city’s airspace during the summit. Other small protests, including one targeting climate change, are planned.
Scattered protests over the past week have been relatively small, including a march through the “Magnificent Mile” shopping district that drew about 100 people Thursday.
But the much larger nurses’ rally will mark a ramp-up to Sunday’s anti-NATO march by underscoring that money spent fighting wars means less money for health care, education and other social programs, said Andy Thayer, an organizer of the anti-NATO march. His group — Coalition Against the NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda — has been working to draw those connections ever since President Barack Obama moved the G-8 summit, potentially dampening enthusiasm for a Chicago demonstration.
“I think it’s really going to be big … with the nurses,” Thayer said. “That is going to be the 99 percent staking itself against the 1 percent, drawing the connections between the war abroad and the war on working people here at home.
“They are the front-line caregivers … and the nurses to their credit understand the connections between NATO, G8 and the deplorable state of health care in our country and are speaking out about it.”
Estimates of how many might show up Sunday have varied widely, from a couple thousand to more than 10,000. Busloads of demonstrators from around the country have begun arriving in Chicago, though some who had planned to come, including from the Occupy movement, have said they’re staying home or going to an area near Camp David instead.
But some activists are anticipating they’ll be joined by many more people than expected.
“Chicago has a reputation for resisting,” including a 2003 demonstration against the Iraq War that flooded downtown Chicago with 10,000 people, said one of Thursday’s protesters, Salek Khalid, a 21-year-old student at Northwestern University. “I feel comfortable saying Chicago will live up to its reputation, hopefully peacefully.”
Police and the Secret Service have taken no chances, as Obama and 50 heads of state begin arriving for the NATO summit, where leaders will discuss the war in Afghanistan and European missile defense.
Security is high on trains. Barricades and fences have been erected around landmark buildings. Streets are being closed. And world-class museums are shutting down.
Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said Thursday that the protesters so far “have been very well behaved.” He said he did not anticipate that the tenor of Friday’s rally would be different, but that if it is, “We are going to carry through with what we said we were going to do. We’re going to facilitate the rights of these individuals while preventing criminal actions.”
___
Associated Press writer Jason Keyser contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on
Imprint. It piece is a much expanded version of an article co-written with photographer/writer John Gruber for
Print Magazine and the British trade mag Ads International in 1998.
Samuel Insull - 1920
The thought of Chicago in the 1920s usually conjures up images of gangsters, Prohibition and other Roaring 20s clichés, but there was another movement in the Chicago area that encompassed this decade. It inhabits the world of graphic art and has gone relatively unheralded, especially outside the Windy City region – The Insull Transit Posters.
Samuel Insull (1859-1938) left his British home in 1881 for New York to become Thomas A. Edison’s assistant. He eventually worked his way up to become one of the founders of what we now know as General Electric, and in 1892 left New York to helm the financially struggling Chicago Edison Co. In general terms, Insull’s most important contribution to modern life is his dedication to the idea that electricity use should be for the common consumer and not a novelty of the rich. He believed in providing electricity to as many customers and at the lowest price possible. Much of what we take for granted today in terms of the use and distribution of power and energy can easily be attributed to his groundbreaking ideas and efforts. By the 1920s Insull owned shares in all the major Chicago area utilities as well as the region’s transit lines, specifically the Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee (North Shore Line), Chicago South Shore & South Bend (South Shore Line), Chicago Aurora & Elgin and the Chicago Rapid Transit (Elevated/”L”) Lines. He solidly invested in programs to modernize, consolidate and publicize their existence and offerings. The poster campaign he initiated is but one aspect of the comprehensive program of advertising and promotion he developed.
It’s my contention that a good deal of what inspired Samuel Insull in the use of graphic art for his utility posters and marketing efforts during the 1920s must have come from what he witnessed Frank Pick was simultaneously implementing with the use of art and design in the London Underground’s poster and branding campaign.
The London Underground's Frank Pick (1878-1941)
Insull traveled extensively to his U.K. homeland throughout his years in America, and what he saw and learned in Britain could often directly influence how he ran his utilities in Chicago. For instance, while visiting Brighton, England, in 1894 he noticed that many of the shops that were closed for the evening were still brightly lighted – something unheard of in the “flat-rate billing” world of the United States. After tracking down the head of that township’s electric company, Insull was introduced to the use of a “Demand Metered” billing system. It applied different rates to different times of the day. Upon Insull’s return, Chicago soon saw a similar approach as well as an eventual 32 percent cut in rates for the consumer. Insull’s use of poster graphics so closely on the heels of Pick’s approach in the U.K. seem so similar that I have to believe it’s more than coincidence. The major difference, however, is that Pick’s influence is still evident in the identity of London Transport – from the use of Edward Johnston’s font “Johnston Underground” (commissioned by Pick and precursor to Gill Sans – Eric Gill was a student of Johnston’s) to Johnston’s “Roundel” logo, and the continued marriage of varied graphic art styles within LU promotion, the hand of Frank Pick continues to guide the company’s image. It’s a truly remarkable demonstration of how a strong, consistent branding vision can withstand the test of time yet continue to feel fresh. I’ve always seen it as a precursor to what MTV did when it was sculpting its image in the 1980′s – commissioning the talents of independent animators to design and produce short network IDs in varied techniques and styles, but always reinforcing the core MTV sensibility.
Below: A select group of London Underground posters
Frank Newbould 1929 - C. Paine 1921 - E. McKnight Kauffer 1921
Maxwell Armfield 1915 - A. Rogers 1930 - V.L. Danvers 1924
Two classic graphic creations: Edward Johnston's LU "Roundel" logo and his "Johnston Underground" typeface.
The control of the utilities and transit lines in 1920s Chicago offered Insull all sorts of opportunities to cross-promote his empire. He could encourage the development of rural areas into suburban communities by stretching his railways out and making them commutable into the city. This not only created customers for the transit lines, but also new subscribers to Insull’s electric utility network – it all tied together. And the land used by the utilities to run their electric lines via high tension towers could also be utilized as a right of way for the expansion of the railways. As a result, it totally made sense to entice the masses to leisurely explore the virgin countryside and in the process offer potential homeowners a cleaner (electric railways were void of the soot and cinders of steam railroads) and more pastoral existence. This is obvious in many of the posters’ imagery. Chicago’s transit lines had been doing advertising and even some poster designs since the 1910s, but there was no consistent graphic approach or what we now know to be “branding” in the direction of the marketing. This all changed once Insull took hold of the Elevated Rapid Transit System and the associated interurban lines. He soon assigned the poster project to the railroads’ president, Britton I. Budd, who later brought people like the North Shore Line’s Publicity Manager Luke Grant and Commercial Department Head John J. Moran, into the fold.
Britton I. Budd (1871-1965)
The design of the posters covered a wide range of styles. From the figurative work of artists like Willard Frederic Elmes and the young Oscar Rabe Hanson to the flat graphic interpretations of Ervine Metzl, many of the works produced were as strong and bold as anything being created simultaneously in the U.K. or Germany. The series not only utilized the talents of professional artists like Leslie Ragan, Elmes and Metzl, but also was a proving ground for newcomers like Hanson, and other art school students like Clara Fahrenbach and Wallace Swanson.
The depression of the 1930s not only effectively shut down the production of the poster campaign but also destroyed Insull’s entire empire. His electricity, gas and transportation utility and holding companies that served 5,000 communities in 32 states soon collapsed and he found himself indicted on multiple charges – and ultimately acquitted in each and every verdict. By the end of all legal proceedings in 1935, Samuel Insull was ruined. He and his wife, Gladys, settled in Paris and on July 16, 1938, Insull was felled by a heart attack. Ironically, he had been stricken while awaiting a train in the Paris Metro…
The Chicago transit posters designed between 1920 and 1930 received a fair amount of attention in the U.S. and the U.K. They won medals in several Art Directors Club annual competitions and to this day there are eight examples in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Once the transit poster campaign ended in 1930 the collection of images drifted into obscurity. It would take 45 years and an exhibition organized by Dave Gartler and his Chicago vintage poster shop Poster Plus, to resurrect them. Gartler came into an archived cache of them that had never been used and were still in their original folded condition. He painstakingly restored and mounted them for an exhibition in his gallery and they’ve been highly sought after collectibles ever since. Almost all the images in this article are included here thanks to Dave and Poster Plus. He remains the expert authority in this realm.
I’ve included some minimal biographical material on W. F. Elmes, Walter Graham, Ervine Metzl and Leslie Ragan. Except for these designers, biographies of the artists involved have been most elusive, so I hope readers don’t feel I’ve done an injustice to the artists or the subject matter.
As far as I know, the following assemblage is the most comprehensive collection of the Insull Transit posters ever gathered together in one article. I’ve listed the following images together alphabetically by the artist…
________________________
Harry Walters Armstrong 1883-1954
1924
________________________
Ivan V. Beard 1896-1980
1927 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1927- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1928
________________________
Robert Beebe 1896-1965
All 1923
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Carroll Thayer Berry 1886-1978
1927
________________________
Roy F. Best
1922
________________________
Emil Biorn 1864-1935
1929
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Otto Brennemann 1864- ?
All 1926
All 1926
1927 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1928 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1929
________________________
Willard Frederic Elmes 1900-1956
1922 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1923 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1923
Both 1923
All 1924
Both 1925
1925- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1926 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1928
Elmes’ also contributed to the Mather & Company 1924 motivational poster series profiled by Steven Heller here.
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Francis Raymond Elms 1906-1984
1927
________________________
Norman Erickson 1884-1964
1925 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1925- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1926
All 1926
________________________
Clara B. Fahrenbach 1886-1976
1927
________________________
Walter Graham 1903-2000
1929
I was fortunate enough to speak to Walter Graham in 1998 about his work and also sent him a copy of his Insull poster, which he’d lost long ago. He freelanced as an illustrator/artist after he finished school in 1928 and had his own commercial art studio, Nugent-Graham Studios in Chicago, from 1937 until he left for the Northwest to retire as a full-time painter in 1950.
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Oscar Rabe Hanson ? -1926
All 1923
All 1923
All 1924
All 1924
All 1926
1926 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1927
________________________
Raymond E. Huelster 1890-1955
1927- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1928
Both 1929
________________________
Arthur A. Johnson 1898- ?
1923 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1924- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1924
Both 1924
Both 1925
All 1925
1925- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1925 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1926
________________________
Charles B. Medin
1925 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1929
________________________
Ervine Metzl 1899-1963
Both 1921
1923- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1923- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1924
Ervine Metzl was arguably (even when considering the prolific career of Leslie Ragan) the most successful of all the artists in the Insull poster series. He designed posters, did several covers for Fortune, and illustrations/covers for other magazines and books, and was as a designer for U.S. Postal stamps from 1957-60. He’s credited with helping along a young Paul Rand by pairing him up with a NYC ad agency in the 1930s and introducing him to the influential package/industrial designer George Switzer. Metzl served as a mentor to a young Ron Barrett, designer/cartoonist/humorist, and later illustrator of “Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.” Metzl also wrote an early definite study of poster history “The Poster” in 1963.
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Datus Ensign Myers 1879-1960
Both 1922
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Rocco D. Navigato 1895-1942
1923- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1924- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1925
All 1926
________________________
Walter Necker
1927
________________________
Ruth A. Olson
1925
________________________
Leslie Ragan 1897-1972
All 1927
1927- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1927- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1928
Leslie Ragan made a career out of designing railroad travel posters. Beside the half dozen scenes he did for the South Shore Line, his work for the New York Central Lines, Norfolk & Western and the Budd Corporation, produced over one hundred images.
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Wallace Swanson
1925
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Hazel B. Urgelles ? -1989
1923- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – — - 1924- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - 1925
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(2 remaining posters by unknown artists)
1924
(Maybe Harry Walters Armstrong ?)
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As an added bonus, I’ve decided to include rare examples of the original gouache paintings done by some of the artists as designs for their posters. Nowadays, a photographic and usually digital process is used to reproduce posters in quantity. The artist’s original design is simply reproduced in whatever form the final piece needs to be in. Back then, the lithography process used to (re)produce these posters involved taking an artist’s artwork (in this case 15″ x 22″ water-based gouache paintings on board) and translating the designs to separate lithography stones – one for each color. The lithographer’s objective was to faithfully reproduce everything from color to texture and then register all the separate color levels during the printing process to replicate the original design. The final image was also enlarged to the standard 27″ x 41″ (one sheet) poster size for exterior display on the train platforms, etc. What’s interesting are the changes made between when the artist finished his painting and the final poster was printed. Sometimes, for specific reasons lost to time, the text was changed as evidenced when comparing the paintings to the final product. (BTW, as far as I know, the “Winter-Fields By The North Shore Line” poster only exists as a gouache painting, I haven’t been able to locate a lithograph poster print of it yet.)
The original gouaches are below with their various sources/credits included underneath the image.
Laura Hedien - - - - - - - - - - - - Dave Myers
Dave Myers - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dave Myers - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -B. Mooney Photography- Chicago
Hopkins Stolp Peffers
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A two-page spread from the 1927 Westvaco "Inspiration for Printers" annual (reprinted from the 1926 British annual "Posters & Publicity").
Pages from 1928 and 1927 Art Directors Club annuals.
1920's Edwards & Deutsch Lithographing Co. picnic photo (Nice squeeze-box !). E&D was one of the firms in Chicago chosen as lithographers for the posters along with National Printing & Engraving Co., Illinois Lithographing Co., and Gugler Lithographing Co.
A brochure from the 1910s era prior to Insull's poster program showing the extensive use (see below) of poster advertising along the elevated system.
The four sets of photographs below show how the Insull Transit posters were mounted on-site. By enlarging shots like these, I’ve been able to discover posters not found anywhere else. The detail in these pictures is truly remarkable.
E/NE view of Linden Avenue stop, Wilmette, IL
Loyola Station looking south on Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL
Northeast view of Isabella stop, Evanston, IL
Left: Edison Court/Waukegan. Il. Top right: 5 Mile Road/Racine, WI. Bottom Right: Indian Hill/Winnetka, IL.
Even though the Insull poster campaign was discontinued by the onset of the Depression, there was a revival of sorts of the program in 1997. Addressing many of the same reasons that the original posters were created — to stimulate residential, commercial, and industrial growth, Mitch Markovitz (formerly the art and advertising director of the South Shore Line in the ’80s) was commissioned by the Northwest Indiana Forum to produce new posters. Mitch served as the founding artist and art director of the campaign and produced a run of lovely images in the process. The works of Markovitz not only took inspiration from the original series, but paid a respectful homage to Leslie Ragan in particular. I’ve included several examples of Mitch’s work below…
Contemporary posters by Mitch Markovitz
Corrie Lebens and Zero Lastimosa were endlessly patient and helpful in working with me on the production of this piece.
The other people and organizations that I’ve relied upon (over a 15-year period) to help me cook this casserole are: Dave Gartler and his Poster Plus shop/gallery, John Gruber — an amazing photographer/editor/writer/historian –, Mitch Markovitz, the late Arthur D. Dubin who connected me with SO many people who have become good friends and collaborators, John Horachek, Bob Harris, Laura Hedien/Tom Herrara, Graham Garfield, Norm Carlson, Walter Keevil, the late George Krambles, his nephew Art Peterson and the “Krambles-Peterson Archive”, John Wasik, Cousin of Ervine Metzl — Karen Kohn, Erich Knautz, Dave Myers, Eric Bronsky, the late Walter Graham, Martin Tuohy, Britton Budd descendent James Delacour, Ken Fletcher, Scott Gendell, Al Louer, Denny Mayer, Malcolm D. McCarter, Ed Tobin, Barbara Mooney, Wilmette Historical Museum, Milwaukee Public Library, Highland Park Historical Society, and the Chicago History Museum (formally the Chicago Historical Society).
Finally, please refer to the book, “Moonlight In Duneland” by Ronald D. Cohen & Stephen G. McShane 1998 Indiana University Press for a great profile of the Insull Transit Poster campaign. It concentrates primarily on the work done for South Shore Line, but still nicely analyzes the overall series.
If you’ve listened to a political pundit predict any election in the last 50 years, you’ve been told that there are Republican small towns whose politics are organized around the three G’s (guns, God and gays) and there are Democratic cities whose politics are organized around the two L’s (labor and economic liberalism). While this binary mythology is insulting for its hackneyed stereotyping and lack of nuance, it has at least half the story right — in terms of sheer partisanship, many rural areas do tend to go red, and many urban areas do tend to go blue.
Where this story goes wrong is in its ideological suppositions about the cities — and specifically, about Democratic cities. Sure, two or three decades ago, there may have been some truth to the notion that the American city is a union-driven bastion of populist progressive economics. But today, while cities may still largely vote Democratic, they are increasingly embracing the economics of corporatism. The result is that urban areas are a driving force behind the widening intra-party rift between the corporatist, pro-privatization Wall Street Democrats and the traditional labor-progressive “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.”
Start with a look at Chicago, the metropolis most identifiably (and inaccurately) branded as a hotbed of labor power and liberal economics.
In recent years, the Windy City has become “the most aggressive city in the United States in the privatization of public infrastructure,” according to the Public Interest Research Group. Citing the city’s budget crisis, officials have sold off highways and parking meters at cut-rate prices — all to pad the profits of corporate investors (the schemes are now being explored by other Democratic cities including Pittsburgh and Los Angeles). Despite this, during its once-in-a-generation contested mayoral election in 2010, the city’s voters chose investment banker Rahm Emanuel over other far more economically progressive candidates, and Emanuel quickly filled his administration with corporate consultants eager to accelerate the privatization already under way. Now, Emanuel has declared war on organized labor, with the Associated Press’s headline blaring “Even in Chicago, Mayor Goes After Labor Unions.”
A similar trend is happening in my home city of Denver.
As in Chicago, lazy reporters and pundits equate the Mile High City’s votes for Democratic candidates as proof of the city’s alleged affinity for liberal economics. But Denver is today embracing right-wing economic ideology — and that ideology’s politician-promoters — with the zeal of Colorado Springs.
A few years ago, the city saw one of right-wing billionaire Phil Anschutz’s corporate takeover specialists, Michael Bennet, appointed school superintendent and then use his power to thrust the public schools’ finances into the hands of his friends on Wall Street. The move effectively forced Denver taxpayers to use money for public schools to subsidize the profits at financial behemoths like JP Morgan. Nonetheless, when Bennet turned around and ran for Senate on huge campaign contributions from the very financial sector that he helped fleece Denver taxpayers, the city rewarded him, first by giving him higher-than-expected vote totals to defeat a progressive primary challenge, and later by delivering him the general-election margin of victory.
In the last year, Denver has moved even farther to the economic right. In early 2011, it elected Michael Hancock, the most economically conservative mayoral candidate in a large field of choices — a man who, as mayor, has made headlines by effusively complimenting George W. Bush; appointing a top Republican who previously headed a corporate front group as his chief of staff; pressing for so-called education “reforms” specifically aimed at undermining the teachers union; and starring in television ads railing against a progressive ballot measure that would mandate employers allow workers to accrue paid sick days.
Seeing that conservative political trend, record-setting amounts of corporate money subsequently flowed into the city’s major elections this fall. The result? A city which just a few years ago voted to raise taxes to support public services voted down a progressive state ballot measure to better fund education in a state that — compared to others — disproportionately underfunds its schools. It also succumbed to a massive corporate-financed campaign and rejected the paid sick days initiative (which had initially polled well). Additionally, it preserved a school board majority that has already aggressively worked to undermine traditional public education.
Similar examples are everywhere.
On education, the Democratic-voting city of Washington, D.C., was the place that launched the political career of Michelle Rhee, the face of the right-wing effort to siphon public school money into private schools; Democratic Los Angeles has seen a successful Wal-Mart-funded effort to encroach on traditional public education, with more privately administered “public” schools than any district in the country; and Democratic New Orleans has seen a wholesale charter-ization of its schools.
On economic justice issues, the Democratic-voting city of Philadelphia saw its popular mayor veto paid sick days legislation (it ultimately passed over his objections) while Democratic-voting cities like Oakland, Boston and Denver have led the way in deploying their police forces on peaceful Occupy Wall Street protestors.
On spending issues, Democratic-voting cities across the country have simultaneously slashed social services while offering up huge taxpayer subsidies for stadiums, corporate office buildings and other private, for-profit projects.
And on tax issues, Democratic-voting New York City has seen its billionaire mayor become the national champion of regressive tax cuts for the wealthy.
Though Bloomberg is officially an independent, his brand of politics perfectly epitomizes the radical shift in urban economic ideology from one of labor/progressive traditions to a now-familiar greed-is-good crony conservatism — all under the veneer of liberalism. Like now-standard Democratic Party corporatism that puts a velvet glove of equal rights rhetoric over the brass knuckles of Big Business cash, his formula relies on a larger realignment of liberal orthodoxy away from economics and toward social issues. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi put it:
[Bloomberg] is a billionaire Wall Street creature with an extreme deregulatory bent who has quietly advanced some nastily regressive police policies… but has won over upper-middle-class liberals with his stances on choice and gay marriage and other social issues.
Bloomberg’s main attraction as a politician has been his ability to stick closely to a holy trinity of basic PR principles: bang heavily on black crime, embrace social issues dear to white progressives, and in the remaining working hours give your pals on Wall Street (who can raise any money you need, if you somehow run out of your own) whatever they want.
He understands that as long as you keep muggers and pimps out of the prime shopping areas in the Upper West Side, and make sure to sound the right notes on abortion, stem-cell research, global warming, and the like, you can believably play the role of the wisecracking, good-guy-billionaire Belle of the Ball…
Though Taibbi was writing about Bloomberg specifically, his words aptly sum up what the American cityscape has become — yet more scorched earth in the successful assault of Limousine Liberals and Crony Corporatists on Lunch-Pail Liberals and Progressive Populists. In political terms, it represents the broader success of the transpartisan moneyed class in fully redefining “liberal” exclusively as “social-issue liberal” — without regard for economic agenda.
To be sure, most cities may never vote for openly declared Republicans (though it’s worth noting that New York City did see a longtime Democratic congressional district go to the GOP a few months back). But official partisan complexion is far less significant in the day-to-day lives of most citizens than the rightward shift of public policy in America’s biggest population centers.
This truism, which the red-versus-blue fetishists in our media and political arenas refuse to acknowledge, is well understood by movement conservatives (as just one example, here in Denver, it was major GOP donors that underwrote the nominally Democratic candidates who promised to preserve the corporate takeover of the city’s school board). They get that, at the policy level, it doesn’t really matter if cities votes for candidates who call themselves Democrats, independents or liberals, and it doesn’t matter if reporters keep misrepresenting cities as enclaves of ultra-liberal economics — as long as this breed of politicians continue getting urban areas to play their new role pressing the conservative economic agenda.
Rahm Emanuel was sworn in Monday as Chicago’s first new mayor in two decades, a historic power shift for a city where the retiring Richard M. Daley was the only leader a whole generation had ever known.
The former White House chief of staff took the oath of office at downtown’s Millennium Park, one of the signature accomplishments in Daley’s efforts to transform Chicago from an industrial hub into a gleaming global tourist destination. He planned to head to City Hall later to the fifth-floor office that was Daley’s lair for 22 years.
“We must face the truth,” Emanuel said in his inaugural speech. “It is time to take on the challenges that threaten the very future of our city: the quality of our schools, the safety of our streets, the cost and effectiveness of city government, and the urgent need to create the jobs of the future.”
“The decisions we make in the next two or three years will determine what Chicago will look like in the next 20 or 30.”
Emanuel inherits a city with big financial problems. His transition team predicted a $700 million budget shortfall next year, but because of some controversial decisions by Daley — most notably the push to privatize parking meters — he has limited ways to pay for school improvements or repair the city’s aging infrastructure.
In his speech, Emanuel walked a fine between bluntly assessing the city’s problems without being directly critical of the departing mayor.
“From the moment I began my campaign for mayor, I have been clear about the hard truths and the tough choices we face. We simply can’t afford the size of city government that we had in the past, and taxpayers deserve a more effective and efficient government than the one we have today.”
Emanuel also showed that he would not be shy about wading into national politics, referring to efforts in other Midwestern states to eliminate union rights for many public employees as part of budget cuts.
“I reject how leaders in Wisconsin and Ohio are exploiting their fiscal crisis to achieve a political goal. That course is not the right course for Chicago’s future,” he said.
Emanuel, who represented Chicago in Congress before he went to Washington to become Obama’s senior aide, made his mayoral ambitions known more than a year ago during an interview on Charlie Rose’s PBS talk show, saying it was “no secret” that he wanted to run for mayor if Daley did not seek re-election.
When Daley announced last fall that he would not seek a seventh term after 22 years in office — a longer tenure than any other mayor in the city’s history — some wondered if Emanuel had some prior knowledge when he made that comment.
But if he did, that didn’t stop him — just days before Daley’s stunning announcement — from renewing his lease with the tenant who rented his Chicago home while the Emanuels lived in Washington.
That decision to rent his house was at the center of the biggest obstacle standing between Emanuel and the mayor’s office: the legal battle over whether he was a resident of Chicago and eligible to run for mayor.
The fight ended with an Illinois Supreme Court ruling in his favor — but not before an appellate court panel knocked his name off the ballot, citing his time away from the city.
Once that issue was out of the way, Emanuel simply steamrolled over his opponents.
Branded as a Washington outsider by other candidates, Emanuel didn’t miss an opportunity to remind voters that, unlike his opponents, he had friends in high places, even as he sought to convince Chicagoans that he was one of them.
Armed with a $14 million campaign war chest that dwarfed those of his opponents, the only question in the last weeks of the race was whether Emanuel would get enough votes to avoid a runoff.
Emanuel, who kept his temper and his famously profane vocabulary in check during the campaign, ended up collecting 55 percent of the vote. In his last election campaigns, Daley was accustomed to collecting more than 70 percent.
Emanuel seemed to allude to his reputation when he spoke about school reform.
“As some have noted, including my wife, I am not a patient man,” he said. “When it comes to improving our schools, I will not be a patient mayor.”
Once elected, Emanuel wasted little time putting his administration together, bringing with him a number of people from his days in Washington.
For key posts, he went far outside the city. He hired the schools chief in Rochester, N.Y., to run the city’s massive education system. He went to Newark, N.J., to find his police superintendent rather than promoting from within. And where Daley hired a local newspaper reporter as his press secretary, Emanuel hired his away from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington.
In his speech, Emanuel thanked Daley for his service to the city, noting how the “world class” park where he was speaking had once been an abandoned rail yard and “nagging urban eyesore.”
“A generation ago, people were writing Chicago off as a dying city,” the new mayor said. “They said our downtown was failing, our neighborhoods were unlivable, our schools were the worst in the nation, and our politics had become so divisive we were referred to as Beirut on the Lake.”
When Daley took office in 1989, “he challenged all of us to lower our voices and raise our sights. Chicago is a different city today than the one Mayor Daley inherited, thanks to all he did.”
Emanuel’s swearing-in completed an interesting role swap between City Hall and the White House: Emanuel’s replacement as Obama’s chief of staff is the outgoing mayor’s younger brother, William Daley.
In a mark of Emanuel’s continuing ties with Washington, Vice President Joe Biden attended the inauguration, as did William Daley, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geitner and two other cabinet secretaries.
Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was sworn in Monday as Chicago’s first new mayor in two decades, a historic power shift in a city where the retiring Richard M. Daley was the only mayor a whole generation of Chicagoans have ever known.
Emanuel was sworn in during a morning inauguration ceremony at the popular downtown Millennium Park, one of the signature accomplishments in Daley’s efforts to transform the city. Emanuel later planned to head over to City Hall and, for the first time since he was elected in February, walk into the fifth-floor office that was Daley’s lair for 22 years.
“We must face the truth,” Emanuel said in his inaugural speech. “It is time to take on the challenges that threaten the very future of our city: the quality of our schools, the safety of our streets, the cost and effectiveness of city government, and the urgent need to create the jobs of the future right here in Chicago.”
“The decisions we make in the next two or three years will determine what Chicago will look like in the next 20 or 30.”
Emanuel’s swearing-in completes an interesting role swap between City Hall and the White House: Emanuel’s replacement as Obama’s chief of staff is the outgoing mayor’s younger brother, William Daley.
In a mark of Emanuel’s continuing ties with Washington, Vice President Joe Biden was in attendance at the inauguration, as was William Daley, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geitner and two other cabinet secretaries. Also scheduled to be there were the ambassadors of Mexico and six other countries.
Emanuel inherits a city with big money problems. Not only has Emanuel’s transition team predicted a $700 million budget shortfall next year, but because of some controversial decisions by Daley — most notably the push to privatize parking meters — he has limited avenues to fund efforts to improve schools and repair the city’s aging infrastructure.
It’s a challenge Emanuel has not shied away from.
Emanuel, who represented Chicago in Congress before he went to Washington to become Obama’s senior aide, made his desire to be mayor known more than a year ago during an interview on Charlie Rose’s PBS talk show, saying “it’s no secret” that he wanted to run for mayor if Daley didn’t seek re-election.
When Daley announced last fall that he wouldn’t seek a seventh term after 22 years in office — longer than any other mayor in the city’s history — some wondered if Emanuel had some prior knowledge when he made that comment.
But if he did, that didn’t stop him — just days before Daley’s stunning announcement — from renewing his lease with the tenant who rented his Chicago home while the Emanuels lived in Washington.
That decision to rent his house was at the center of the biggest challenge standing between Emanuel and the mayor’s office: the legal battle over whether he was a resident of Chicago and eligible to run for mayor.
That fight ended with an Illinois Supreme Court ruling in his favor — but not before an appellate court panel decided that Emanuel’s time away from the city made him ineligible to run and knocked his name off the ballot.
With that out of the way, Emanuel simply steamrolled over his opponents. Branded as a Washington outsider by other candidates including former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and former Chicago schools president Gery Chico, Emanuel didn’t miss an opportunity to remind voters that, unlike his opponents, he had friends in high places, even as he sought to convince them that he was one of them.
There was the campaign stop by former President Bill Clinton and the visit to Chicago by the Chinese President Hu Jintao — a visit, Emanuel reminded reporters, that included a private meeting between the two.
Armed with a $14 million campaign war chest that dwarfed those of his opponents, the only question in the last weeks of the race was whether Emanuel would get 50 percent of the votes plus one vote to avoid a runoff.
Emanuel, who kept his temper and his legendary profane vocabulary under wraps during the campaign, ended up collecting 55 percent of the vote. In his last election campaigns, Daley was accustomed to collecting more than 70 percent.
Once elected, Emanuel wasted little time putting his administration together, bringing with him a number of people from his days in Washington.
For key posts, he went far outside the city. He hired the schools chief in Rochester, N.Y., to run the city’s massive school system. He went to Newark, N.J., to find his police superintendent, choosing the head of that department rather than promote someone already in the department. And where Daley hired a local newspaper reporter as his press secretary, Emanuel hired his away from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington.
In his speech, Emanuel thanked Daley for his service to the city, noting how the “world class” park where he was speaking had once been an abandoned rail yard and “nagging urban eyesore.”
“A generation ago, people were writing Chicago off as a dying city,” the new mayor said. “They said our downtown was failing, our neighborhoods were unlivable, our schools were the worst in the nation, and our politics had become so divisive we were referred to as Beirut on the Lake.
“When Richard M. Daley took office as mayor 22 years ago, he challenged all of us to lower our voices and raise our sights. Chicago is a different city today than the one Mayor Daley inherited, thanks to all he did.”
Anti-war activists demonstrate outside President Barack Obama's campaign headquarters in downtown Chicago, on Thursday, May 17, 2012, protesting for an end to NATO operations in Afghanistan. President Barack Obama and 50 heads of state arrive for a NATO summit that takes place Sunday and Monday at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago along Lake Michigan.(AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast) (Credit: AP) 
Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel (Credit: AP) 
Rahm Emanuel takes the oath of office of Mayor of Chicago from Timothy C. Evans, Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County during inaugural ceremonies Monday, May 16, 2011 in Chicago. Watching are from left, daughter Ilana, wife Amy Rule, daughter Leah and son Zacharia. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)(Credit: AP) 
FILE - in this file photo taken Wednesday, April 27, 2011, Chicago Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel smiles as he answers questions at a discussion about how the arts contribute to the development of a thriving region during The Arts and Culture in Action event at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. When Emanuel takes over as mayor on Monday, May 16, he will infuse Chicago City Hall with hip vibe as he inherits a vibrant city from outgoing Mayor Richard M. Daley. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green, File)(Credit: AP) 
