Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
Some residents came out early Sunday to help, trying to sweep up the pieces on the ground.
"This started out to be about George Floyd," said a man on Clark Street. "But it turned into something else, about what they could grab and take and ruin. Look at it."
And you saw broken windows too, on TV, with looters going in and out. Or police cars burning. Or business owners weeping. Or that officer being dragged by the mob as cops took abuse, many of them worried that if they put their hands on someone, they'd be the star of another video, singled out by politicians, costing them their jobs.
The riots spread across Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and as the rule of law broke like so much glass. It began as a legitimate and rightful protest over the Minneapolis police killing of Floyd, the cop Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck. But it shifted quickly into something else.
Then it wasn't about Floyd anymore. Then it wasn't about peace and justice. The mob began looting what it could. And Chicago began to weep.
The mayor and the governor finally called out the Illinois National Guard on Sunday to protect downtown, but by then it was too late. Downtown had already been smashed. They'd been caught unprepared for what came at them. Even after Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered a 9 p.m. curfew, looting continued. They raged up and down Roosevelt Road on Saturday night and in other parts of the city.
I'd been standing on broken glass outside Brindille, the Michelin star restaurant co-owned by Carrie Nahabedian in the 500 block of North Clark Street. Her beautiful custom-made window had been shattered by a fire extinguisher. The looters left the tablecloths on the tables. But they also left something else for her:
Despair.
"I just broke down," Nahabedian told me. "I was sickened by what happened to Mr. Floyd, who wasn't? But then Brindille is attacked? I know it's just property and just a building and just a restaurant. Thank God nobody was hurt. But it's our restaurant, it's my dream, and all the love and care we put into it, and they destroyed it because they could. It's personal, an attack on everything we stand for."
Soon we'll all be overwhelmed with political spin about who's at fault and why. As I write this, the progressive Democrats who run Chicago, Cook County and Illinois look shaken, and engage in virtue signaling at a news conference; liberals mugged by reality.
Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, who lowered the felony threshold on shoplifting long ago — triggering a wave of shoplifting by organized booster gangs — is rambling on about her feelings. But those are just words. They don't sound like broken glass under your boots.
Brindille's beautiful window was more than just glass. Brindille represents a highly civilized state of mind, the best of Chicago, a tradition of expert chefs and service that goes back hundreds of years, to all the great French chefs who came before Nahabedian, and what she learned in the kitchens of the Ritz Hotel as a teenager, and all the teaching she's imparted to young chefs since then.
Dinner there is about being witness and celebrant of the best of Western tradition. But a raging mob of barbarians destroyed it just because they could.
"Their actions had nothing to do with the man, Mr. Floyd, who should have been honored," Nahabedian said. "Look around the country. In all the cities. This was an organized attack. What does Gucci have to do with the murder of Mr. Floyd? Or Versace? Nothing. Or any place that was destroyed."
She paused for a bit, and on Clark Street I could hear the sound of glass push-broomed into a scoop shovel.
"We've lost something critical," she said. "We've lost our civility. And that's what's breaking my heart."
When City Hall finally decided to raise the bridges on Saturday, the rioters tearing up Michigan Avenue went west and smashed what was in their way. They found Gene & Georgetti, the iconic Chicago steakhouse. A stolen typewriter was thrown through the window.
"Look what they did to my place," owner Tony Durpetti told me. I sat with him, and his wife, Marion, and his daughter Michelle at one standing table, the others smashed and tossed around, broken, the liquor stolen. "We've gone through so much already."
Durpetti and Nahabedian and other restaurant and retail merchants had hoped to meet with their own staffs this week, in preparation for opening soon, after that the nine-week COVID-19 government shutdown. But will tourists come to a Chicago that lost the rule of law?
"Chicago is strong," Lightfoot said from City Hall, her voice breaking like those of so many other big-city mayors over the weekend. "This is our home. This is a city we built with our blood sweat and tears. This is a city we must protect so it can provide for us. If it gets destroyed, we are all left to all pick up the pieces."
Like all that broken glass on the sidewalks of Chicago, each shard a piece of somebody's dream.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.