Let’s see:
- Bilk taxpayers out of $12 million to tear down a neighborhood and build an unneeded baseball stadium downtown? Check.
- Rename the team in honor of a punctuation mark (and not even the correct punctuation mark) and create a logo that looks like an angry purple penis? Check.
- Mismanage your business to the point where all construction on the stadium stops and contractors are owed almost half a million dollars in back pay? Check.
- Use this stellar track record to blackmail the taxpayers into lending you another $16 million so the bulldozed neighborhood, half-built stadium, and surrounding blight don’t hang around for another ten years or so attracting vermin? Check.
- Provide actual new stadium and revenue for the city while paying back the loan? Probably not anytime soon.
Who didn’t see this coming? Apparently not our esteemed mayor. But it’s amazing he can see much of anything, what with his head stuffed so far up Billy Prim’s ass and all…
What is the correct punctuation mark? A hyphen?
Hyphen it is.
Why can’t Gavin Newsom be as competent as a mayor?
How ironic that this team is affiliated with the Chicago White Sox, who also wiped out a working-class black neighborhood to build its “new” Comiskey Park stadium in 1990.
Residents couldn’t cry “racism”, which it was, because the head of the Illinois Sports Authority who brokered the stadium deal, Peter Bynoe, was black.
Homeowners were given a choice of $60,000 (a pittance even 20 years ago), or a new house in a neighborhood a mile east. The new homes were so shoddily built, cracks appeared in the walls a few years after completion.
The old park was surrounded by businesses – stores, restaurants. The new one is an island surrounded by parking lots. There are no businesses to compete with in-stadium food and apparel sales — White Sox owners saw to that. In a last act of corporate greed, Comiskey Park, a 90-year old name, is now U.S. Cellular Field. Its clientele is almost exclusively white, suburban, and middle and upper class. And so it goes.