A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
CPS is breaking apart. After selling their headquarters at 125 S. Clark St. for $28 million, the organization has moved nine-hundred staffers to a smaller office at 42 W. Madison. Three hundred are relocating to what was formerly Dodge Elementary School, and the rest are going to a former school building at 501 W. 35th St., where the school district houses a large portion of its IT. Tom Tyrell, the district’s chief operating officer, predicts the move will save the district $60 million over fifteen years—$5 million of which has already been spent on new office furniture.
The President Lands
But by the time you read this, he’ll have already left. President Barack Obama (and his extensive entourage) made a quick stop in Chicago this week to cast his early vote in the midterm elections and to campaign for his fellow Illinois Democrats. While he voted at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Center at 43rd and S. Cottage Grove, a poll worker asked the President if he was who she thought he was. His response, like his stop at home, was brief. “That’s me,” the most powerful man in the country said before getting down to business. After voting, Obama stopped by Governor Pat Quinn’s campaign office and mingled with some wealthy fundraisers in Lincoln Park.
A House Is Not a Home
After Chicago’s most anticipated arson attempt didn’t quite take last week, the colorful structures Redmoon floated down the river are still standing, housed in a Bridgeport lot. The scorched buildings proved too damp or sturdy to succumb to the Great Fire Festival’s flames, and sit upright, their paint marred by burns roughly as severe as those served up on twitter in the Festival’s wake. Redmoon spokespeople say the buildings will be repurposed for next year’s festival, a phoenix-style recycling that strikes as practical, if less exciting than the Up scenarios some editors had hoped for.