Lyn Hughes should have known better. You can’t offend your alderman, even inadvertently, and expect the city to treat you fairly.
Shaw managed to become a big shot in his ward again, but by the end of the 90s his organization was being challenged by a new political coalition led by Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. and the Reverend James Meeks. In 1999 Shaw stepped down as alderman to run for the Cook County Board of Review and slated his son, Herbert Shaw, to run for his old seat. Herbert lost to Anthony Beale, who’d been backed by Jackson and Meeks. The two organizations kept battling, but eventually Robert Shaw and his twin brother, William, saw the writing on the wall and moved their base to the south suburbs, where they began warring with forces loyal to Frank Zuccarelli, the Democratic committeeman of Thornton Township.
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In October the planning department and Beale announced that they were seeking bids from developers to build housing on the lot. They were also telling Hughes she could no longer use it as a parking lot.
Nevertheless, at 5:30 AM on January 7 at least two dozen city workers arrived in the parking lot next to the museum with orders to move the sculpture about a dozen feet to the south, onto Hughes’s property. There were laborers, cops, engineers, planners, an art consultant, and press spokesmen, and they’d brought city trucks and cars, a backhoe, and a crane.
By Boyd’s count, the city assigned six bridge-division workers, two supervisors, one crane operator, one backhoe operator, one planner, one planning department spokesman, five lawyers, and six police officers to the effort. “I figure they spent at least $30,000,” she says. “And don’t forget the security guards. One of the guards told me it costs $50 an hour for his service–he doesn’t get that, his company does. I still can’t figure out why they were there. Were they protecting the statue? Did they think someone was going to take the statue?”
Zuccarelli called later that day to tell me that his offer was real and that he saw nothing peculiar about moving a Pullman porters museum out of Pullman. “A lot of the people who live in the south suburbs used to live in the city,” he said. “I used to live in the city. This is a great idea. I welcome the museum to Thornton Township.”
