It was over in minutes. “Sold—for $3,125,000,” barked the auctioneer, and Thalia Hall no longer belonged to Giuseppe Burlando.
Geraci says that because he and Burlando are in court, on the advice of his attorneys he won’t get into specifics. But he says, “I did not steal the building. The whole world had the opportunity to buy the building at the sale. They can concoct whatever story they want, but the victim situation does not exist. This is something that started with good intentions and unfortunately ended up in this situation.”
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But that’s not how things turned out. As Linda Lutton reported in 2001 in the Reader, Rodriguez felt the city was trying to strong-arm him into selling the hall to the United Neighborhood Organization, a group with ties to City Hall that wanted it for a community center. Rodriguez says UNO and the Eighteenth Street Development Corporation offered him about $750,000 for the building and when he refused to sell it inspectors started coming by and slapping him with code violations. He says his applications for the permits he needed to fix the violations were constantly delayed and denied.
“I felt like I was chasing my tail, going from court back to the architect back to court. It was a revolving door,” he says. “I was never going to get the permits to rehab that building. I used to think government worked for the people, but I was so naive. They just use [building inspections] to acquire buildings they want.”
“This happened several times,” Rodriguez continues. “I didn’t think I would get anyone to buy the building. And then Katrina approached me with their proposal.”
“It turned out that was the last rave they had, and when we were there all those years later the flyer was still in the display case,” she says. “It was like a sign.” She and Burlando decided to try to line up investors. “We wanted to see that it was saved.”
The antigringo graffiti on the walls of Thalia Hall infuriated Walker. When she was younger, Walker, who’s now 29, had been one of the few white girls in Pilsen—she’d taken cooking and ballet classes at the Gads Hill Center, and most of her playmates had been Mexican.
