Comments on: The Candidate: Reform-minded alderman Toni Preckwinkle takes aim at the Cook County Board Presidency

By: Hyde Park alderman Preckwinkle takes County Board Presidency nomination | The Chicago Weekly Blog

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:55:33 +0000

[...] Preckwinkle, the Hyde Park alderman who Clare Fentress profiled in our pages earlier this winter, has handily won the Democratic primary for the highest office in Cook County government, and with [...]

By: Brian Ashby

Brian Ashby — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:44:10 +0000

Anyone curious about alderman Preckwinkle or considering voting for her for Board President should learn or remember that she has played an integral role in the short-sighted, wasteful, and tragic on-going destruction of the Michael Reese Hospital campus, in particular four buildings (and counting) that were found last year to have been designed with significant input from Walter Gropius, world-renowned architect and founder of the Bauhaus. Thanks to Toni Preckwinkle, Chicago has the honor of being the first city in the world to destroy a permanent Gropius work. It seems ridiculous to call a candidate “reform-minded” as she does her best to fall in line with the successive Machine administrations that have destroyed so much of the city’s irreplaceable heritage — Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, the list goes on… — for the most myopic of reasons. Preckwinkle for months has refused any meeting with the preservationist Gropius in Chicago Coalition, and her record of ignoring, distorting, and denying facts about the site’s (her ward’s, and its residents’) history is well-documented: http://www.savemrh.com/display/Search?searchQuery=preckwinkle&moduleId=3245150, including in the Maroon in October. After the city lost its Olympic bid (calling for an Olympic village on the site), alderman Preckwinkle didn’t stop for a single breath before taking the lead from Chicago 2016 in expediting the “re-development”, this time with no plan for its future whatsoever. In December, the state’s Historic Sites Advisory Council recommended the site for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places: Preckwinkle still acts as if her constituents want her to demolish what is potentially the most lucrative tourist attraction on the South Side, in order to replace it with 37 acres of vacant lots, at the cost of almost $200 million in taxpayer money. Can’t wait to see what she does with our hospitals and prisons. This is the candidate you believe will “make Chicago the model of green jobs and green job programs”? The naivete of this profile is alarming.

By: Preckwinkle picks up endorsement after endorsement | The Chicago Weekly Blog

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:22:46 +0000

[...] Toni Preckwinkle, the 4th Ward alderman we profiled in this week’s feature, may not be ahead in the polls, but she’s winning the hearts of newspapers right and left in her campaign for the Democratic nomination for Cook County Board President. The Tribune and the Sun-Times both enthusiastically endorsed her earlier this week, and the Austin Weekly News, a West Side community newspaper, added its voice to the Preckwinkle chorus last night. The Illinois chapter of the Sierra Club also endorsed her last week. Add in the endorsement from Daley fan Phil Krone at the Chicago Daily Observer and the fact that Mayor Daley’s brother’s law firm donated $1,500 to Preckwinkle’s campaign, and it looks like everyone’s lining up behind the Hyde Park alderman. We’ll see if the voters follow suit on February 2. [...]