Vote blocked on renaming Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive for Black explorer Jean Baptiste Point DuSable
An effort to honor Chicago’s Black founder Wednesday by putting his name on the city’s most iconic street ran aground — at least temporarily — at a City Council meeting marked by parliamentary maneuvering, accusations of racial inequity and threats of future payback.
The acrimony that broke out in council chambers as two aldermen deferred the vote on whether to rename outer Lake Shore Drive in honor of Jean Baptiste Point DuSable was noteworthy even in a body renowned for high octane clashes and political theatrics.
The DuSable naming ordinance will come back to the council for an up-or-down vote next month, so the delay might just be temporary. It remains to be seen whether hard feelings linger among Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the 50 aldermen.
When the ordinance — which the mayor has not supported — came up for a vote Wednesday, Lightfoot immediately recognized Downtown Ald. Brian Hopkins, despite the fact South Side Ald. Sophia King was calling for a roll-call vote on the measure.
Lightfoot later told reporters she saw Hopkins’ hand first.
Giving Hopkins the floor allowed him to move to defer the DuSable proposal. His motion was promptly seconded by close mayoral ally Ald. Ariel Reboyras even as King called out to Lightfoot “Oh, come on, President, don’t be so transparent.”
“Ald. King, you’re out of order, please,” Lightfoot replied.
“I’m not out of order,” King said. “I had my hand up before. I see the play here, I called for a roll call, just like we did before. This is just inequity playing out, right here in front of us.”
The parliamentary maneuvering to stop his ordinance prompted South Side Ald. David Moore to promise to block “everything” in retribution.
He quickly made good on his threat, using his own parliamentary move to shunt several proposed ordinances by Hopkins and others to the council Rules Committee, where they will require at least one extra hearing before they can be considered for passage.
Before Wednesday’s meeting — with rumors of a pending deferral swirling — Moore said his colleagues had plenty of time to learn about the particulars of his DuSable ordinance, so there was no legitimate reason for any of them to delay it.
“When I defer something, it’s because I need more information,” he said. “That’s not the case here, so why would they do this? I do think there are racial overtones.”
But Hopkins, 2nd, said it’s still unclear if the new street name would force residents in several Downtown buildings to change their home addresses, and said he needs clarity on that before voting on it.
Reboyras could not immediately be reached to discuss his reasons for voting to defer the measure.
As if to bless the high-drama proceedings, a renowned 1980s-era Council Wars character, former Ald. Dick Mell, appeared at Wednesday’s meeting via video link to talk about a longtime city employee who was being honored. Mell spoke for several minutes before Lightfoot urged Reboyras to cut him off.
After the meeting, Lightfoot said it’s time to honor DuSable for his role in founding the city but there’s a difference of opinion about how to do so.
Many people she’s spoken to are opposed to changing Lake Shore Drive’s name, she said. “It’s one of the most iconic assets the city has. When you say Lake Shore Drive, people know you’re talking about Chicago, and I think that’s very important,” Lightfoot said.
“At the end of the day, the people who are Lake Shore Drive or nothing, we’ll see where that goes,” she said.
With the delay, aldermen will instead consider the changing the outer Drive’s name from Hollywood Avenue to 67th Street at the June 23 meeting, unless Lightfoot schedules a special meeting before then.
The proposed change is the highest profile renaming of a public space in Chicago in recent memory. Lake Shore Drive is a beloved, rambling piece of the city’s DNA (even though public space advocates complain it cuts walkers and bikers off from the lakefront).
Compare that with crusading Black journalist Ida B. Wells getting a stretch of less prominent Congress Parkway named for her in 2019, and with former Mayor Jane Byrne’s name being added in 2014 to the heavily trafficked but hardly adored Circle Interchange.
The DuSable renaming plan also has been met with more dissent than most earlier changes. In fact, Moore said last month he was told Lightfoot had “concerns about marketing the city” if his proposal succeeded. The mayor has proposed her own separate downtown DuSable honor.
And he said he was approached by someone from the administration who tried to convince him to just rename the outer Drive south of 35th Street, which only would have impacted the road in predominantly Black parts of Chicago.
Moore started his push in 2019. He brought the plan forward after he said he was upset by how little he heard Chicago’s founder’s name as a downtown boat tour guide talked about the many honorees in the city’s public places.
But while renaming Chicago’s lakefront boulevard would be by far the most prominent honor bestowed upon DuSable, it’s hardly the only one.
There’s DuSable Harbor in Lake Michigan east of Grant Park, the DuSable Museum of African American History in Washington Park and a bust of DuSable along Michigan Avenue just north of the DuSable Bridge downtown.
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The DuSable Leadership Academy high school in Bronzeville operates out of a landmarked building that for decades housed the larger DuSable High School.
For the many supporters of renaming Lake Shore Drive, all those other designations pale next to this one, which Moore has argued will help South Side children such as those in his predominantly African-American 17th Ward “see the possibilities.”
And there could be another dedication in the works for DuSable, who’s credited as the area’s first nonnative settler for establishing a trading post along the river in 1779.
While declining to endorse the Lake Shore Drive ordinance, Lightfoot introduced her own plan to rename the downtown Riverwalk for the Haitian explorer and to finally complete DuSable Park, which Mayor Harold Washington first proposed in the 1980s for a 3.3-acre site east of Lake Shore Drive downtown near the never-completed Spire tower.
Moore said the mayor’s plan was appropriate only as a complement to his ordinance. The Lake Shore Drive renaming will cost about $2.5 million, he said, compared to around $40 million for the mayor’s downtown idea.
Lightfoot has said she intends to go ahead with her proposal in any case. On Wednesday, she said a permanent DuSable exhibit along the Riverwalk would be more meaningful than changing the name of the road.
Wednesday’s meeting also featured unusually contentious debates over proposed zoning changes.
Aldermen approved a zoning change that would allow affordable housing units to be built in McKinley Park near an asphalt plant, but not before some Black and Latino City Council members objected to the proposed development, which they said would house people of color in a location with unsafe air.
South Side Ald. Leslie Hairston, 5th, said she “cannot be part of putting Black and brown people on environmentally hazardous land.”
Others rejected the argument. Latino Caucus chairman Ald. Roberto Maldonado, 26th, said the city desperately needs affordable housing.
Black aldermen also objected to a proposed zoning change for a marijuana dispensary in the Northwest Side 45th Ward. Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, argued that there hasn’t been an equitable distribution of licenses for Black and Latino cannabis dispensary owners.
“This vote today is a matter of greed,” Ervin said.
But Ald. James Gardiner, 45th, and others argued it was simply an expansion of a current license. The measure passed 31-19.
