Nancy Jefferson and the west side of Chicago.
They tell me it will take five years before I can say I’m “Brooklyn.”
I’m 76 so we will see if I make it.
It took me ten years before I could really claim Chicago as my home.
I know the day it happened.
I went and bought myself a serious winter coat and boots.
By then it was clear I wasn’t going back to L.A.
Soon after arriving in Chicago my buddy Wayne Draznin and I rented an apartment on the west side by Augusta and Austin Boulevards.
That was in 1973.
In those days everybody on the west side of Chicago knew Nancy Jefferson.
Nancy Jefferson was known as the "Joan of Arc of the West Side."
As head of the Midwest Community Council for 25 years, she battled for the residents of the west side, which she called “the best side” and for greater investment, housing and jobs.
She was was instrumental in rebuilding Garfield Park after the rebellion that followed Martin Luther King’s murder.
Jefferson also served under the first Black mayor of Chicago as part of Harold Washington's transition oversight committee.
In 1988, Jefferson and a group of other West Side activists threatened to declare “open war” on City Hall after acting Mayor Eugene Sawyer awarded a city contract to the nephew of a Chicago alderman.
A year later, she fought Chicago-based Quaker Oats Co. over its lack of minority hiring in management and appointments to its board.
Nancy Jefferson died at the age of 69 in 1992.
In 1986 the late Mayor Harold Washington named a 2 1/2-half-mile stretch of Warren Boulevard as Nancy B. Jefferson Boulevard.
Nancy Jefferson Boulevard is just to the west of the United Center where the Democratic Party’s national convention will take place in a few weeks.
Ironically, it lies within the “restricted zone” where no protests are allowed during the time of the convention.
I’m not sure Nancy Jefferson would approve.
Or abide.
Last week I read some interesting news.
The Reinsdorf and Wirtz families on Tuesday unveiled a proposal to remake the Near West Side neighborhood around the United Center, replacing unsightly parking lots with publicly available green spaces, a 6,000-seat music hall and thousands of new homes.
The families jointly own the 30-year-old United Center, home to the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago Blackhawks, and said their new plan, dubbed the 1901 Project, would be more than a sports-focused district.
“It’s going to be a new neighborhood with the United Center as its anchor,” said United Center CEO Terry Savarise.
A “new neighborhood”?
Does that mean new neighbors?
I’m sure that if Nancy Jefferson were alive today she would be asking that question.