The big squeeze
Unilateral shenanigans on Taylor Street
April 09, 2003|By Carol Marin.
Carol Marin is a Chicago journalist and former CBS correspondent.
Unilateral.
It's a word that has gotten a lot of play lately.
It's seldom a compliment.
After all, it means being concerned with only one side.
Your own.
President Bush is unilateral in his foreign policy, according to critics who argue U.S. interests too often trump legitimate concerns of other countries.
And Mayor Richard Daley? Well, look up "unilateral" in the dictionary and soon you'll find a picture of Meigs Field beside it.
But just because unilateral is a big word does not mean it always applies to big situations. Like all politics, unilateral can be very local.
Just go down to Chicago's Little Italy and ask Oscar D'Angelo, consultant-lobbyist, friend-of-the-powerful.
Or, better yet, ask Skippy.
Skippy's real name is Mario DiPaolo and like his father before him of the same name, he runs the little lemonade stand, Mario's Italian Lemonade, on Taylor Street.
The business was started by Skippy's father who left Italy in 1938 and went to work on Taylor Street. From a pushcart he sold lemonade. And lupini beans. People say he worked, saved his money and along the way, bought some buildings.
Skippy's dad is gone now. In November, a small crowd gathered in front of the lemonade stand to honor him. Chicago Ald. Daniel Solis (25th) renamed that little stretch of Taylor Street "Mario DiPaolo Lemonade Stand Street." New signs went up.
A couple of weeks ago, some dark-hearted miscreant unilaterally tore those honorary street signs down.
A week ago all chaos broke loose when a city zoning inspector showed up. It seems Skippy was breaking the law by parking his red mini-van (with "Lemon" on the license plate) on a vacant lot he owns.
You read that correctly.
Skippy got a ticket for parking his own car on his own lot.
That's when Skippy went ballistic and took out after the man known by many as "The Mayor of Taylor Street," Oscar D'Angelo.
He allegedly drove over to D'Angelo's house, grabbed D'Angelo, who was in his bathrobe, by the throat and threatened to kill him yelling, "You've got to stop (expletive) with me." It's all in the police report that charged DiPaolo with battery. He's got a May 16 court date.
For years Oscar D'Angelo has traded on his connections and reaped the rewards.
A lawyer for the politically connected law firm Altheimer & Gray, D'Angelo was disbarred in 1989 during the federal Greylord probe for doing favors for judges, like getting them free rental cars. Disbarment was but a mere bump in a very lucrative road.
In recent years you've read or heard Oscar D'Angelo's name involving O'Hare International Airport concessions or city contracts or land-development deals that end up in the hands of friends of Daley or other political powerhouses. D'Angelo is often somewhere in the picture "lobbying" or "consulting" on behalf of worthy investors for a sizeable fee.
And in his spare time, he has micromanaged Taylor Street, operating there as if it is his own private preserve, a place where longtime homeowners have been told what to do and when to do it.
A few years ago a woman there told me D'Angelo pulled up one day in his Cadillac to tell her to change the color of the mortar she was using to tuckpoint her bricks. Unilateral.
It's little wonder, therefore, that Mayor of Taylor Street is for some hardly a term of endearment. Many in Little Italy look at D'Angelo the same way owners of Cessnas look at Mayor Daley these days.
In the last decade, land values in Little Italy have skyrocketed. Today, single-family homes are replaced by cookie-cutter condos and town homes. The Chicago Housing Authority's ABLA public housing development, which stood smack in the middle of Little Italy, is boarded up and the smell of money is in the air. Vacant land is at a premium.
DiPaolo owns almost the whole block where his lemonade stand sits. That includes a prime double corner lot that friends say D'Angelo has been pressuring him hard to sell or develop. DiPaolo has done neither.
Neither D'Angelo nor DiPaolo would talk about their tiff. Those who do talk don't want to be quoted, but see this as a fight over development.
A city changes and grows and that's good. But sometimes it's worth hanging on to old neighborhoods and old ways.
Ald. Solis had new "Mario DiPaolo Lemonade Stand Street" signs made and put up.
That may not be enough.
A lot of folks on Taylor Street are angry. And they are proud of Skippy DiPaolo for standing up to the Mayor of Taylor Street.
They want to do something to show their pride.
Another honorary street sign, perhaps?
"No," said one longtime resident. "A statue maybe."
In the dead of night. Unilaterally.
