The first car stolen was a purple 1993 Chevy pick-up. It was taken from a car lot in the 600-block of Champaign Avenue in Rantoul. It was found burning a few days later in Dolton, a southern suburb of Chicago. The second car was a 1994 Chevy Blazer. It was taken from the 1000-block of Englewood Drive. It turned up two weeks later in Chicago Heights and it too had been set on fire.

Is suburban Chicago’s “car kebab” going to that junkyard in the sky?

That’s what locals are wondering now that a giant spike of eight speared automobiles in a Berwyn, Ill., shopping-center parking lot faces an uncertain future.

Macy’s will build a new distribution center in southwest suburban Minooka to replace its existing distribution center at 4000 W. Diversey Ave., which will be shuttered next spring.

Macy’s also will move a furniture clearance store now at the Diversey complex to a leased space in a retail center near Fox Valley Mall in Aurora.

BACK to school Chicago style is unlike back to school anywhere else: try a three-kilometre street parade over six hours with marching bands, dance routines, a candidate for the US presidency, free T-shirts and smoky street barbecues feeding an audience of thousands of cheering spectators.

But then, school in Chicago may not be quite like anywhere else either. Last year 34 public school students died violently, 25 of them gunned down in their homes, in alleys and, most notoriously of all, on a school bus.

It means the head of the public school system, Arne Duncan, worries as much about keeping his students alive as lifting school standards. It has him in the thankless position of trying to enliven the gun law debate.
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The Chicago public school system has been abandoned by the middle class. Its 415,000 pupils are 90 per cent black and Hispanic. Most live below the poverty line. Something like 9000 are in effect homeless. Many rely on their school to feed them.

From statistics on the average amount of credit card debt per resident to pollution emissions by county, Crain’s Chicago Business’ impressive Market Facts provides a wealth of data about the Chicago area.

The 2007 version of Market Facts - available online free of charge - is the product of a “ground-up redesign,” including video segments that complement more than 100 infographics contained in the feature.

The suburban edition — a smaller version of the newspaper called the Reader’s Guide to Arts & Entertainment — published for the final time last week, says Publisher Mike Crystal.

Although the Reader’s new circulation total — 135,000 — will be the same as the combined circulation was for the two editions, the paper is calling it a 15% increase in circulation for the main edition.

You go first, Mayor Daley. Go ahead, eat the fish out of the Chicago River. You said last month when you inaugurated the reopened Chicago Riverwalk that the water had gotten so clean that you’d eat the fish. We were skeptical about the safety of river fish, so we had some tested.You were right, sort of.

The Chicago River is getting cleaner.

And it is safe to eat the wide variety of fish found in the river, but in small amounts — one 8-ounce meal a month for rock bass, bluegill and pumpkinseed fish, according to the state EPA’s chief toxicologist, Tom Hornshaw.

If it seems as if the cost to park downtown is skyrocketing, that’s because Chicago rates have spiked about 50 percent in the past five years, according to a recent study conducted by Colliers International USA, a Boston-based real estate firm.

“Chicago is very expensive and parking rates are rising much faster than in the country overall,” said Ross Moore, Colliers’ research director.

In the past year, Chicago rates have increased about 12 percent, compared with 4.4 percent for the country as a whole. The city’s average monthly rate is $350 and the daily median is $28.
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The Streeterville Organization of Active Residents, known by its acronym SOAR, wants Children’s Memorial Hospital to further refine its plans for a new $800 million Streeterville facility before seeking city approval.

After 10 months of negotiations, the residents do not yet have from Children’s a definitive plan for parking, the resolution of traffic problems noted in the hospital’s own study or a final building design, said Patty Frost, a SOAR director.

He then described the village’s strategy to stop the city from tearing down parts of the village for the multiyear, $15 billion runway expansion project. Bensenville officials claim Chicago doesn’t have the money to complete the project, which is at least $400 million over budget and behind schedule.