Still, most of the people who got in were in a mood to reminisce. One young woman remembered how she’d conned her way into a label party at age 17 by pretending to be a magician’s assistant. Someone else recalled how he’d thrown up on his wife’s shoes during a Nashville Pussy show. Then there was the tattoo artist from Madison who’d never been to Lounge Ax until closing night. Meanwhile, a small throng waiting outside in the cold was coveting his spot. “I just thought I’d come down and check it out,” he said.

Rock fans loved Lounge Ax, but to an outsider, it’s hard to explain precisely why. The sight lines were terrible, there was no air and it was nearly impossible to find a place to sit. A lot of local musicians hung out there, which sometimes made it seem annoyingly clubby. As a friend of mine put it, “Whenever I come here, it’s like I’m at someone else’s office party.”

When it came to actually seeing a show, however, the club permitted no privilege. Last Tuesday night’s bill featured the Tucson Americana outfit Calexico. As they began their set, Julia Adams, the club’s co-owner with Sue Miller, sat on a stool in the back of the bar and surveyed the great lake of bobbing heads in front of her. “This is like my favorite band in the whole world,” she said, “but there’s no way I’m going up there. It’s too crowded.”

Lounge Ax’s closing is a familiar Chicago story these days. Neighborhood bars, once the mainstay of the city’s social life, have been shuttered by the hundreds in the last five years, victims of a booming real-estate market and a particularly draconian Liquor Commission.

Beginning in 1996, when a new condo-owning neighbor began complaining about noise, Lounge Ax struggled with the city’s bureaucracy. It never fully recovered from legal fees, incessant ticketing and Kafkaesque days in court. Other clubs in hipper neighborhoods began to draw the top bookings, and Lounge Ax began its twilight.

When a 26-year-old mortgage banker bought the building in December and told the club it had six weeks to live, everyone was shocked, but no one was really surprised. Chicago, like so many American cities, is quickly gentrifying, and a club like Lounge Ax doesn’t always fit into the urban scheme.

Lounge Ax went out with an excellent party, nearly without sentiment. Occasionally, a kind of muted sorrow oozed up through the floor. Last Sunday night, before breaking into an inevitable round of Johnny Cash covers, local punk hero Jon Langford, head of the Mekons and the Waco Brothers, paused and put his head in his hands. “Oh, no,” he said with a thin coat of irony. “They’re closing the Lounge Ax. Now where are we going to go?”

But this case is notably different from the recent charges of excessive force in New York and California. In February, when four white New York City police officers gunned down Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African street vendor living in the Bronx, it was easy to frame the incident in terms of race. But these Chicago shootings do not follow any familiar pattern of police racism. The realities are more complex, and in many ways more disturbing. In Chicago, where police always take care of their own and where many politicians are former police officers, achieving justice in such matters is nearly impossible.

The first shooting occurred on the night of June 4. Police on the South Side pursued a car driven by 24-year-old Raymond Smith after he’d tried to “back over” them, according to the officers’ accounts. Smith fled the scene. Cops shouted at his passenger, a 26-year-old computer consultant named LaTanya Haggerty, to get out of the car. Instead, Haggerty reached for her cell phone, which an officer mistook for a gun. She was killed instantly.

A few hours later, at 1 a.m. on June 5, 22-year-old Robert Russ was driving home to visit his family in suburban Calumet City. Police flagged him for “driving erratically.” A five-mile chase resulted. Russ finally spun out of control and stopped on the Dan Ryan Expressway. When he refused to get out of the car, an officer smashed the passenger window with a 9 mm pistol. Russ grabbed the gun, it fired, and he was dead.

Haggerty had no criminal record. Subsequent newspaper accounts of her life portrayed her as almost angelic: She smiled all the time, collected stuffed animals, kept a stash of junk food in her desk, and liked to vacation in Las Vegas with her girlfriends. Russ had previously served 18 months court supervision for assaulting an Evanston police officer who’d tried to break up a fight. But he’d also been an honor student and star football player at Northwestern University. He was supposed to graduate this week.

Though both victims were unarmed, the police department quickly ruled both shootings justifiable, and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley quickly rallied to their defense.

Chicago has a well-documented history of mayors named Daley giving the cops carte blanche to patrol the streets however they see fit. The city’s policies on police supervision and review are skewed to benefit cops, and few are ever rebuked or reprimanded.

Police brutality complaints in Chicago are handled by the Office of Professional Standards (OPS), the police department’s internal-review division. On average, OPS concludes some level of wrongdoing in 7 to 10 percent of the hundreds of complaints it receives a year. These findings are labeled as “sustained.”

“To have a sustained finding, you need way beyond a reasonable doubt standard of evidence,” says Mariel Manasi, a Chicago attorney who specializes in brutality cases. “It needs to be overwhelming. It needs to be 90 percent. When there’s a cop’s word versus a civilian’s word, it is never sustained. Ever.”

In the unlikely event that a complaint is sustained, the officer usually receives a short suspension, usually less than a week. The sentence then goes through the department’s “command review channel,” which, despite its Orwellian name, basically means that the officer’s supervisors get to testify that he’s not really a bad guy.

The police chief then reviews the officer’s sentence, and has the power to reduce it, increase it, or drop it altogether. So does the Police Board, a supposedly independent body appointed by Daley, to whom the offending officer can also appeal.

Manasi, who has handled dozens of brutality cases, says she’s never seen an OPS penalty increased by the superintendent or the board. “The Police Board cuts the number of sustained cases in half,” says Manasi, “and the other half goes to legal arbitration, which then cuts that number by about 75 percent. Finally, after all of that, an officer can appeal the case to the circuit court. When it comes down to it, very few cases are ultimately sustained. In ten years, I’ve seen literally a handful of officers, maybe five, fired for excessive force.” Departments nationwide are notorious for protecting their officers under a veil of secrecy, but in Chicago, the problem is particularly acute. The Chicago Police Department refuses to say how many or which officers have been disciplined. Instead, Manasi and other advocates must rely on their own estimates.

This system works very well for certain well-connected officers. In particular, one Peter Dignan was recently implicated, along with fellow detectives, in five incidents of torturing murder suspects. Superintendent Hillard chose to not sustain the cases, perhaps under the influence of John Townsend, the department’s second-in-command (and a former mayoral bodyguard), who happened have been supervising Dignan at the time. Dignan was subsequently rewarded with a promotion to lieutenant.

The Police Department operates under a tight veil of secrecy about its internal operations. It doesn’t allow anyone, other than attorneys in civil suits, access to an officer’s history of registered brutality complaints. The department repeatedly denies reporters and community activists access to those files, saying they’re part of an officer’s personnel record and therefore not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.

“There is no system of police accountability in this city,” says Chris Geovanis, a member of Neighbors Against Police Brutality, an advocacy group. “It absolutely doesn’t exist. It is a sham. And a taxpaying Chicago resident who wants information about a brutality complaint can’t get it.”

None of this augurs particularly well for the investigations of the Russ and Haggerty cases.

Mayor Daley said he regretted the latest incidents but pointed out that police often are killed in the line of duty. City council members bashed the police but waffled about when they would hold proper hearings. The police refused to offer any information about the officers involved. Although federal and state authorities have begun their own investigations, real police reform seems a distant dream.

In the next few months, the city will most likely settle with the Russ and Haggerty families in civil suits. That approach has worked well for Chicago in police-abuse cases. For instance, officer Rex Hayes, who has 45 complaints on file, has cost the city $2.5 million in lawsuits, with more cases pending. The city prefers the payout method to firing Hayes, who has never been suspended for more than five days despite a series of offenses that include choking suspects already in custody.

“Over and over again, even in the wake of the two shootings, this mayor telegraphs one message to officers,” Geovanis says. “You’re the boss on the streets. Regardless. He’s given absolutely no indication that he’s willing to look at the core problem of accountability.”

Meanwhile, the department has revealed that police officers have shot 21 people this year, killing eight. But there’s been little word about the circumstances of those shootings, the identities of the officers involved, or whether or not they had a history of abusive behavior. The same goes for those involved in the Haggerty and Russ killings. We may never know what kind of cops these people are.

“It doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about one out-of-control police officer, or two, or 10,” Manasi says. “The fact is that they’re allowed to continue doing it. There’s no mechanism in place to discipline them. They know they won’t be punished.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Rush is the most serious challenger Daley has faced yet. He nearly ran for mayor in 1995, but at the last minute let Joe Gardner, a longtime city bureaucrat, get served up as sacrifice. He also stood by and watched as Daley handily took care of former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris, in the general election. Having to run two campaigns became a hassle for Daley, so he managed to get the Legislature to declare municipal elections “nonpartisan.” There would be no more primaries, just one shot, one opposition candidate. For 1999, there was no confusion: Daley’s opponent would be Bobby Rush.

Rush had a distinguished nine-year career as an alderman in a city council that is often a clearinghouse for corrupt buffoonery. His seven years in Congress have been similarly above reproach. He co-founded the Illinois Black Panther Party in 1968, which no one considers a detriment, except perhaps the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. He is well-respected and widely known across the city.

Nevertheless, Rush’s flaws became evident even before he officially declared his candidacy. Last summer, he led a 600-person march on City Hall to protest public-transportation service cuts. Security guards wouldn’t let Rush and his people in, and in a standard trope of Chicago political theater, Rush declaimed that the city’s government was closed to ordinary citizens. But when the service cuts had actually been debated by the Chicago Transit Authority in 1997, Rush had been noticeably absent from the protests. He had also voted in Congress against increasing federal public-transportation subsidies. All that could have been forgiven. But when Rush finally did march on City Hall, this crew included no senior citizens or Latinos — the two populations hardest hit by the transit cuts.

Rush’s biggest sin then was a lack of inclusiveness, and his problems have only grown during this election season. “Campaigns are about addition, not subtraction,” says Rick Garcia, a leading Chicago gay-rights activist, “and Bobby hasn’t added it up right. He’s made all the mistakes of not broadening his base. He doesn’t even play to his base, truth be told. There’s no doubt that the mayor is a formidable obstacle with his money and influence and high favorability numbers, but no individual is immune from criticisms, and I thought the congressman would do much better than he has.”

“Bobby doesn’t have the knack of dramatizing the issues,” says Leon Despres, a Chicago lawyer who served in the city council from 1955 to 1975. “If I were a mayoral candidate, I would hammer at the police brutality issue, but I would hammer at it so that anyone who would read what I say would feel personally involved. You might go out and be arrested, you might have your door broken in. How would you feel, being tortured for something you didn’t do? Make every listener feel that they are in danger. He [Rush] raises the issue very well, but doesn’t dramatize it, doesn’t make shivers come up and down your spine.”

When Rush has tried to personalize issues, he’s ended up looking silly. He held a press conference in December to speak against Mayor Daley’s “gang loitering” ordinance, which is currently being debated before the Supreme Court. Rush had several teenagers with him on the podium. He said that under the loitering law, any of these kids could be arrested at any time, merely for being young and black. It turned out, however, that most of the teens were related to Rush campaign staffers. When reporters asked them if they’d ever had trouble with police, they all said no.

From there, things only got worse for Rush. The city towed his car as he held a press conference criticizing the Daley administration’s snow-removal techniques. A small group of Muslim fundamentalists booed him off the stage during an event to commemorate the end of Ramadan. When the Chicago Tribune disclosed that he owed $750 in parking tickets, Rush denied owing the money, saying that most of the tickets had been accumulated by his wife. Rush continued to rack up absurdities. In a press conference meant to criticize a rise in police brutality, he instead blamed the mayor for the deaths of 500 elderly people during a 1995 heat wave. In another event, he announced that he was being endorsed by the “Greek-American” community, as represented by Peter Pavilos, one of his few major financial backers. He scheduled Anthony Porter, a recently freed death-row inmate, to appear at his campaign headquarters, but Porter backed out at the last minute, saying he wanted to stay out of politics. When Rush planned a walk-around in an Indian neighborhood, he chose to kick off the event at a Pakistani restaurant whose owner was a fervent Daley supporter, down to having autographed pictures of the mayor on his walls.

Perhaps Rush’s best opportunity to slam Daley came in late January, when the city decided to lock out dozens of homeless people from Lower Wacker Drive, where they’ve slept harmlessly for decades. Appearing on Lower Wacker before an enormous crush of media, Chicago homeless advocates and the legendary Studs Terkel decried the city’s heartless actions. Rush showed up separately, with his own entourage, but he wasn’t talking about homelessness. Instead, he was complaining that someone had spray-painted racist graffiti in the elevator of his campaign headquarters. By then, it was obvious that the Rush campaign was a wasted opportunity.

“This campaign doesn’t represent a reasonable, reusable progressive politics in Chicago,” says Larry Bennett, a political science professor at DePaul University, who wrote some of Rush’s early position papers. “What defines a progressive alternative within the electoral context of Chicago at this point is an effort to recharge the Harold Washington coalition. That is 15 years too late. The man is long dead. God bless him, because he was a terrific individual, and a good mayor. But aside from Rush’s campaign just being a backward evocation of a wonderful moment in history, it’s also not at all cognizant of the realities of the city at the present time.”

After the appearance of the mysterious graffiti, Chicago voters were treated to a series of fresh complaints from the Rush campaign, which, according to polls, now trailed Daley’s juggernaut by 48 percent. According to Rush, his campaign was plagued by bomb threats, phone threats and even street crime, as a campaign photographer broke his leg trying to escape from three “politically motivated” assailants.

“Pretty soon, they’ll be throwing bricks through the windows,” Mayor Daley cynically responded.

Meanwhile, people were still waiting for Rush to release his first position paper. With three weeks to go in the campaign, he finally did. But by then no one was listening.

Not that Daley wanted to help Rush run a credible campaign. When Rush desperately, repeatedly called on the mayor to debate him, Daley declined, saying no debates were part of his “campaign strategy.” But there was plenty to debate. On the surface, Daley is incredibly popular. He’s made a number of cosmetic improvements to the city. Flower boxes and street art abound. Tourists are visiting Chicago like never before. The Department of Cultural Affairs has won numerous awards. It’s a great city to live in, if you’re a middle-class white person.

But Daley’s Chicago is not the urban-renewal paradise that the mayor and his supporters claim. His administration is rife with cronyism and petty corruption. Daley regularly rewards his biggest campaign contributors, many of them old family friends, with enormous construction contracts. There is no effective mechanism in place to punish police officers with histories of brutality. Public transportation is collapsing, and creeping gentrification has created a serious shortage of affordable housing. Poor and working-class people are being increasingly squeezed into smaller and smaller areas of the city. He’s a Democratic version of New York’s Rudy Giuliani, offering a kinder, gentler version of Giuliani’s forbidding urban politics.

“He doesn’t provide leadership on basic issues of poverty, racial discrimination, affordable housing,” Despres says. “Daley has this terrible control of the city council. His father controlled it through patronage. Virtually no alderman dared challenge him. Now this fellow has 20 aldermen he’s appointed. He’s pursued a policy of tying every alderman to him by giving them autocratic authority in their ward.”

Thus, the city council routinely passes important bills without debate, often without any opposition votes. Daley’s planning commission pushes through big-ticket development projects with even less dissension. The Police Board is independent of the Police Department only on paper. And while Daley may not have his father’s thousands-strong army of patronage workers, he can still call out the troops when he needs to. Last November, the Hispanic Democratic Organization, made up mostly of city employees, helped knock out Jesus Garcia, a popular Mexican-American state senator and possible future mayoral candidate. The HDO workers told voters that if they elected Garcia, they would lose city services like street repairs, even though Garcia had no power over such matters. Instead, they ended up pushing through their man, Tony Muqoz, a former cop with no political experience.

In this election, the HDO is backing John Pope, a mayoral aide, for alderman of the 10th Ward, an enormous expanse on the city’s southeast side and one of the few parts of the city that Daley doesn’t control. Anyone who supports any of Pope’s nine opponents is in trouble, as a local hardware store owner found out. After he dared to put an opposition sign in his front window, he received an expensive ticket for an “overflowing dumpster” behind his shop. He got the message: Support Daley’s man, or you’ll be punished.

The Chicago Tribune, in a recent interview, asked Daley to describe his political organization. To the paper’s credit, it printed Daley’s nonsensical response verbatim. “I have thousands of volunteers,” Daley said. “That is the key to get the job done. I have volunteers, block clubs, community organizations, you name it. I have people out there, getting the job done in the schools, getting the job done in police, getting the job done at libraries. That is what you provide.”

That’s about as much of an answer as Daley need provide. He’s been mayor for 10 years now, will be mayor for at least 14, and probably for as long as he wishes. Defeating him this time would have been impossible even for the best candidate, and Bobby Rush shouldn’t be ashamed that he’s going to lose. But Rush should be ashamed that he did little or nothing to begin building a coalition that might one day, someday, defeat Daley. The city isn’t better off from this campaign. There is still no credible opposition to Caesar, and one is desperately needed.

“There comes a time when somebody who’s in office a long time gets thrown out,” Despres says. “Daley’s father was approaching that time in 1976, and he died. You build resentments, and finally the resentments accumulate. You also develop fatigue and lose the ability to make people feel enthusiastic about you. Daley’s gotten stronger, and maybe he’ll get even stronger still the next term, but not forever. You’ve gotta look beyond Daley.”

Diallo, a native of Guinea, was gunned down in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building by four New York police officers just after midnight on Feb. 4. He had been unarmed, yet officers unloaded 41 bullets at him, hitting him 19 times. Public anger built in New York, spontaneously and quickly. Over the weekend, the streets in front of his former home were mobbed with peaceful protesters, many of whom had never been to a political event in their life.

The quick mobilization in response to Diallo’s death is a measure of the killing’s shocking brutality. But it also points up the central role of New York’s immigrants in building opposition to Giuliani. On Tuesday, more than 1,000 people showed up outside the federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan to protest Diallo’s killing. People poured off the subway onto Centre Street, a steady stream from 11 a.m. until well after 2. They were almost entirely African-American or African-born, and very few of them were the usual suspects from anti-police-brutality rallies. For once, the International Socialist Organization, the Free Mumia set, the black Muslim radicals were in the minority.

Instead, people in the crowd were using a different rhetoric, talking about a different kind of politics. “They’re trying to pit us against Archie Bunkers, against pro-cop white bigots,” one woman told me. “But we know they’re not our enemy. It’s the poor and the working people, and they’re pitting us against one another. Little by little, the people are starting to understand.”

The rhetoric of class struggle may have been a little antiquated, or a lot antiquated, but the Diallo rally showed the potential for a new kind of politics. People weren’t shouting the usual slogans or going through the usual motions of street protest. Even the Rev. Al Sharpton, the biggest protest hack of all, put aside his usual race rhetoric and appealed for a more universal system of justice.

The absence of white protesters was noteworthy, and yet predictable. The white left in New York is moribund. Aging Upper East Side intellectuals and Vietnam War protesters never show up at protests in this town anymore, and probably never will again. The political landscape of New York has changed entirely. The white intelligentsia isn’t angry about anything and has little or nothing to offer the political debate. Their dirty little not-so-secret is that they benefit from Giuliani’s repressive policies. Their streets are cleaner, their fear of crime dissipated, their place in the city’s socio-political firmament secured. Many old radicals are comfortable now.

Instead, the burden of protesting the system has fallen to an odd mishmash of people, most of them immigrants, some African-American — from chestnut vendors to the mothers of Puerto Rican teenagers to cab drivers, who are at the butt end of the new New York City. Like all protest movements, this one suffers from division, from prejudice, from lack of resources. Most of all, the people who are affected by the repressive policies of the Giuliani administration speak dozens of languages and are from every country in the world. They are nearly impossible to organize coherently — but they are organizing nonetheless.

It’s within the city’s growing street-vendor movement that the potential, and the tension, of this mainly immigrant anti-Giuliani force is evident. The city plans to ban street vending on 100 downtown Manhattan blocks, the heart of the Financial District, as well as to establish a “warrant” system for vendors, which would create a high-priced bidding war for coveted street slots. The system, already in place in city parks, has resulted in concessions going for $400,000 or more. ABC Television already owns several vending outlets, and McDonald’s is bidding for others. One T-shirt concession in Battery Park recently went for $525,000. This latest move is igniting growing militancy by vendors, and the Diallo shooting threatened a conflagration.

Robert Lederman, a New York street artist for who has been a key figure in anti-Giuliani protests — the mayor called him “the No. 1 quality-of-life criminal in New York City” — immediately saw the connections between the Diallo shooting and street-vendor repression. Vendors, he says, face shakedowns at the hands of the police every day. West African vendors, like Diallo, often receive the worst treatment, because they’re often unlicensed and recently arrived, and thus most unfamiliar with the system.

“Drug dealers get less harassment than vendors in this city,” he says, “because it’s harder to make a legitimate drug-dealing arrest.”

Some vendors draw connections between the power of the city’s Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and the power of the police department. The BIDs offer privately funded cleanup and security services that work closely with Giuliani, and they have been instrumental in drafting legislation banning vendors from hundreds of blocks in midtown Manhattan. Robert Loutitt, the Fifth Avenue BID’s vice president in charge of public safety, was a police officer in charge of the city’s peddler squad, which was started under Mayor Ed Koch specifically to rid midtown of unlicensed Senegalese vendors. The Downtown Manhattan BID, which is currently trying to ban vending around Wall Street, is also raising money to build its own police station and train its own private police force. In Lederman’s mind, vendor bans and police brutality are public crimes with the same roots. To him, they represent nothing more than a class struggle for the heart of New York City.

But attempts by Lederman and others to link the Diallo killing to the cause of street vendors fell flat at a rally Wednesday, showing the limits of attempts to mobilize this disparate mass. Just a day after 1,000 people showed up to protest Diallo’s death, a crowd of only 200 showed up to protest the vending ban, smaller than expected. Food vendors complained that street artists didn’t know what it was like to work for a living. Artists complained that food vendors never showed up when their butts were on the line. The police corralled everyone into a barricaded “protest area,” and stood by in case anyone decided to bust out. The vendors listened to a hectoring lecture from Jeff Cicsio of Big Apple Food Vendors, the owner of 500 vending licenses. Cicsio wasn’t talking class struggle, or “Off the Pigs.”

“For the most part, the police are good, hard-working people,” he told the vendors. “There are a few bad eggs, and get them out of the box.” Then Cicsio berated the crowd for passivity.

“Last year you were very successful,” he said to the crowd. “A lot of you came out. We should have had twice as many guys here today. You came to America with a dream: to make a living, to have a better quality of life for your families. They gave you a permit, but now they’re telling you that you can’t use it because they’re closing the sidewalks … They want you out, and you have to realize that. You gotta take a stand … This is America. You have rights. Don’t let anybody push you around … So why aren’t more of you here?”

The Pakistanis, the Chinese, the disabled veterans, listened, but didn’t respond. They hadn’t come to be degraded. An advocate for vendors in Chinatown rolled her eyes. “He’s mistaking their silence for passivity,” she said. “They’re just bored. If they understood that he was talking down to them, they’d be booing him off the stage.”

Lederman took the microphone and did the best he could. Instead of complaining that there weren’t enough vendors, he said, “I’m very glad to see all of you here today. And I want to ask you one question: Are you proud to be vendors?” The biggest cheer of the day went up.

“Are you proud to earn an honest living as a vendor?”

“YEAHHHH!”

“Well, Mayor Giuliani’s been saying some very nasty things about all of you. He says you congest the streets. He says you’re dirty. He says you’re a bunch of criminals. Is that true?”

“Nooooo!”

“Let me tell you what the truth is: Mayor Giuliani is the biggest criminal in New York City!”

The vendors shouted wildly.

It’s obvious that in New York, and in other cities across the country, a movement is building that will eventually take the place of the old left, because the issues at hand, like police brutality, gentrification and sweatshop labor, are of little concern to the old order. It has yet to find its leaders. African-Americans and the labor movement are just beginning to recognize its power. But the reaction to the Diallo killing shows that Giuliani better recognize it, too.