Snow and City Politics

I hate that there is not more snow here. It snowed in October, for God’s sake, and now it’s almost February and there’s hardly an inch on the ground. It was worse before, of course. From December through half of January there was not a single flake that remained more than a moment.

I came to Chicago expecting it to be warmer and have more snow. In truth, I found the opposite. It probably has something to do with the lake, and the ocean, and how the lake is not like the ocean. No salt smell, and less snow. But I miss snow, because without snow winter is just bare trees and flowerless flowerbeds. Without snow there is no play in winter, just toil. And without snow there is just ice.

Of course, the snow in Chicago isn’t always great, even when it comes. It’s good for the first day or so. But then the salt machines come, and in Chicago salt is a political issue. You salt the neighborhoods or they’ll throw you out of city hall. Never mind whether the cars rust and the water is contaminated. Salt them roads. And that means the snow, at least on the roads, turns to slush. And then the slush turns to mud. And then the mud gets flung this way and that, onto the pristine white snow, making everything a grey dirty muddy mess of ice and water and cold and grit. And I hate that.

It’s not unique to Chicago, I know. All cities have the same thing. Cities just don’t go well with snow. But I think they sand more here, because it’s colder and there’d be more ice. And in general I have very little faith that anything the Chicago public works do couldn’t in fact be done better if there was less money involved. See, Chicago’s huge, comparatively. I didn’t realize at first that all the neighborhoods were actually once separate communities. So this whole huge area is under one jurisdiction, and that means the stakes are higher, which means the potential gains from corruption are higher. It’d be like if Boston annexed Revere, Quincy, Cambridge (that’d be the North Side I guess, or maybe Lincoln Park), Brookline, Everett, Somerville, and Medford. And maybe more, I don’t know the exact numbers. But anyway, anyone nowadays would look at such a move and see it as a huge political power grab that would be detrimental to the well-being of the people of Boston.

What I don’t know, is whether anyone thought that when Chicago was gobbling up the likes of Pilsen and Hyde Park and Andersonville. And, if so, what did they do about it?