With its trees and drinking fountain the little triangle of land at the corner of Milwaukee and Augusta certainly looks like a park. The nearby residents who for years have sat in the shade of those trees assume it’s a park. And nobody’s paid any taxes on the land for years–the county lists it as tax-exempt, just as if it were a park.
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McDonald repeatedly called the local alderman, the 27th Ward’s Walter Burnett. When he didn’t respond she sent him a letter. “This tiny oasis has ash, maple and flowering crabapple trees and is a humanizing bit of land in the area,” she wrote on May 6. “So now, this home for birds and these old trees is going to be wiped out and built over in order that more wasteful condominiums in an already oversaturated real estate market can be built.”
He doesn’t say why he hasn’t gotten the owner to clean up the lot, but at least he knows that it isn’t a park, that it’s been privately owned for years. When I called the Cook County assessor’s office they told me the current owner was the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority.
At that point the land should have been put on the county’s tax rolls. It wasn’t, and nobody put it on the rolls in 2003, when it was bought by MCM Properties, the real estate and development company that plans to build the condos. According to Frank Thoke, an MCM spokesperson, his firm bought the land from William Kritt, another local developer. Kritt died in March, and it’s not clear how long he owned the property.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Rob Warner.
