“Alderman Reilly has learned Mayor Johnson is considering converting the Hotel Chicago Downtown into a migrant hotel at 333 North Dearborn in the Marina City Complex,” Reilly emailed constituents on Monday. Reports Block Club, Reilly “expressed concern over the location, writing that a portion of State Street near the hotel ‘has remained on the Chicago Police Department’s “Drug & Gang Hotspot List” for years… The Hotel is steps from an already problematic CTA Red Line stop; just blocks away from the temporary Bally’s Casino; and is surrounded by residential buildings, hotels, and other tourism destinations.'” “Reilly’s ward is home to the city’s largest migrant shelter: the Inn of Chicago. He and Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd), whose ward directly borders the shelter, have called for the city to terminate its contract at the end of the year with the hotel, citing concerns over unsafe living conditions and crime.”
Cruise Bruised: GM’s Driverless Conveyances Stop In United States
“General Motors subsidiary Cruise has paused all driverless operations in the United States,” reports the New York Times, “two days after California regulators told the General Motors subsidiary to take its autonomous cars off the state’s roads. The decision affects Cruise’s robot taxi services in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix, where a limited number of public riders could hail paid rides. Noncommercial operations in Dallas, Houston and Miami were also paused.”
Ford “Pauses” $12 Billion EV Investment: Electric Vehicles Cost Too Much
“Ford has postponed $12 billion in spending on EV manufacturing capacity,” reports Insider. “The company has warned that electric vehicles are too expensive and that demand is slowing. Other automakers are also cutting investment and abandoning manufacturing targets.”
UAW-Stellantis Agreement Includes New EV Battery And Truck Facility In Stilled Belvidere, Illinois Plant
“Stellantis and the United Auto Workers have reached a tentative agreement that, if approved, will bring pay raises, improved benefits and most importantly for Illinois, a new vehicle and an EV battery plant to Belvidere,” reports the Tribune. The contract “includes a twenty-five-percent increase in base wages, cost of living adjustments and the right to strike over plant closures, mirroring a similar deal struck by Ford… But the Stellantis agreement also would restart the sixty-year-old Belvidere Assembly Plant, which has been idled since February.” The GM tentative contract is similar to the Ford and Stellantis contracts, reports Bloomberg.
CTA Rides In October, 6.33 Million, Highest Since Pandemic
The Chicago Transit Authority says good weather and the Chicago Marathon pumped up October ridership, reports the Sun-Times. “Bus ridership in 2023 has increased twenty-two percent in 2023 compared to 2022… Train ridership is up fifteen percent.”
Twenty-First-Century Bathhouse Planned For Near West Side
“Alex Najem, founder and CEO of Fulton Street Cos., plans to build a two-and-a-half story bathhouse at the northwest corner of Madison and Morgan streets,” reports the Sun-Times. “He will lease the 40,000-square-foot building to Bathhouse, an operation based in Brooklyn, New York, that has taken bathhouses upscale, adding therapies and facilities to promote wellness in a social setting. It promises professional massages and scrubs, pools and saunas with different temperatures and a place to dine.”
Wide-Ranging Presidential Order Issued On Limits To AI
“The United States has set out its most sweeping set of AI rules and guidelines yet in an executive order issued by President Biden Monday,” reviews MIT Technology Review. “The order will require more transparency from AI companies about how their models work and will establish a raft of new standards, most notably for labeling AI-generated content. The goal of the order, according to the White House, is to improve ‘AI safety and security.’ It also includes a requirement that developers share safety test results for new AI models with the U.S. government if the tests show that the technology could pose a risk to national security. This is a surprising move that invokes the Defense Production Act, typically used during times of national emergency.” (A White House fact sheet is here.)
The Twenty-Six-Billion-Dollar-A-Year Prime Placement Of Google Search
“The US v. Google antitrust trial is about many things, but more than anything, it’s about the power of defaults,” reports The Verge. “Even if it’s easy to switch browsers or platforms or search engines, the one that appears when you turn it on matters a lot. Google obviously agrees and has paid a staggering amount to make sure it is the default: testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms.”
DINING & DRINKING
National Sandwich Day Only Day To Get Fry The Coop’s Spicy Butter Waffle Sandwich
Friday is National Sandwich Day and the day for Fry the Coop‘s one-day-only five-dollar Spicy Butter Waffle Sandwich. Topped with spicy butter, maple syrup and served between two waffle pieces as the bun, this sandwich is a handheld version of their signature Chicken & Waffles. Limited four sandwiches per person, in-store only and only available at participating stores (not available at Portage Park or Lincoln Park).
Farm Bar In Former Ravenswood Land & Lake Space
“The owner of a popular Lakeview farm-to-table restaurant is opening a second location in Ravenswood” in a few weeks, reports Block Club. “Farmheads Hospitality has taken over the former home of Land & Lake Ravenswood, 1970 West Montrose, with plans to reopen it as Farm Bar Ravenswood on November 15. It will feature a menu by chef David Wakefield that’s similar to Farm Bar Lakeview.”
Halloween Candy Inflation At Double Digits
“For the second year in a row, U.S. shoppers are seeing double-digit inflation in the candy aisle. Candy and gum prices are up an average of thirteen percent this month compared to last October, more than double the six-percent increase in all grocery prices,” reports CNBC. “That’s on top of a fourteen-percent increase in candy and gum prices in October 2022. ‘The price of candy has gotten to be outrageous,’ said Jessica Weathers, a small business owner in Shiloh, Illinois. ‘It doesn’t make sense to me to spend a hundred dollars on candy.'”
Ozempic And Similar Drugs Coming For Your Junk Food
“Can Ozempic save us from the perils of obesity? It turns out that the drug, first developed to treat diabetes, has become a high-profile appetite killer. Ozempic and similar drugs are skyrocketing in popularity, thanks to their ability to help take off those dreaded pounds,” writes Laura Washington at the Trib. “Another delicious fringe benefit: The nation’s leading producers and sellers of food, especially of the junk variety, are worried that consumers may be cutting back on loading up the shopping cart.”
FILM & TELEVISION
“The War On Disco” Detonates PBS
“The plan was simple enough: Gather a bunch of disco records, put them in a crate and blow them to smithereens in between games of a doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers at Comiskey Park. What could possibly go wrong?” asks Chris Vognar at the New York Times (free link). “This was the thinking, such as it was, behind Disco Demolition Night, a July 1979 radio promotion that went predictably and horribly awry. The televised spectacle of rioters, mostly young white men, storming the field in Chicago, sent shock waves through the music industry and accelerated the demise of disco as a massive commercial force. But the fiasco didn’t unfold in a vacuum, a fact… ‘The War on Disco’ makes clear.” The documentary “traces the rise, commodification, demise and rebirth of a dance music genre that burned hot through the seventies, and the backlash against a culture that provided a safe and festive place for Black, Latino, gay and feminist expression.”
Young Matthew Perry’s Best Film Experience Was In Chicago
“Long before ‘Friends,’ Matthew Perry made his movie debut in ‘A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon,’ befriending co-star River Phoenix and falling ‘deeply in love with acting,'” reports the Sun-Times.
STAGE
“The Who’s Tommy” And “The Notebook” Headed To Broadway; Maybe Boop, Too
“Both ‘The Who’s Tommy’ (which premiered at the Goodman Theatre) and ‘The Notebook’ (which premiered at Chicago Shakespeare Theater) are on the Broadway docket for the spring,” reports Chris Jones at the Trib’s Theater Loop newsletter. “The cast for ‘Tommy’ has not been announced but… every adult company member from Chicago is likely going. ‘Notebook’ also is retaining its Chicago cast, except that Dorian Harewood now plays Older Noah. There’s also a chance the new show about Betty Boop, trying out here in a few weeks, also will make it to Broadway this season.”
Robert Brustein, Ninety-Six, Was Major Force In American Nonprofit Theater
“A critic and dramatist himself, Robert Brustein started repertory companies at Yale and Harvard and fiercely defended the art form, even if it meant feuding with playwrights,” reports the New York Times (free link). “A prolific writer with the zeal of an environmentalist and the moral certainty of a martyr, he reviewed stage productions for The New Republic for more than fifty years,” reports Bruce Weber. “In many books and in countless newspaper and magazine articles, he argued for brave theater, intellectual theater, nonpandering theater, and worried that the art form was being attenuated by the profit motive. Mr. Brustein was a passionate defender of the resident, nonprofit theaters whose ranks expanded across the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century, and as such he was perpetually concerned that they not be corrupted by commercial interests. The Broadway megahit ‘A Chorus Line,’ in one instance—originally produced in 1975 by the Public Theater in New York—had made it clear that a hit show could funnel many years of economic fuel back to the source. ‘The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit,’ he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. ‘The basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.'”
ARTS & CULTURE & ETC.
Field Museum Takes $20 Million Gift For Education Initiatives
“The Field Museum received a $20 million donation to go toward initiatives in student education and programming,” tallies Crain’s. The gift “is one of the largest single donations to the museum and the largest for its education department. It was made by the Sue Ling Gin Foundation Trust, named for the businesswoman who founded the Chicago-based Flying Food Group and was a Field Museum trustee.”
Billionaire Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott Grants $5 Million To Skills For Chicagoland’s Future
Nonprofit “Skills for Chicagoland’s Future, which connects job seekers from disadvantaged neighborhoods with hiring companies, will receive $5 million from MacKenzie Scott,” reports Crain’s. This is her “second record-breaking donation to a Chicago organization in under a week… The gift came through Scott’s charitable fund, Yield Giving, which uses what it calls a ‘quiet research’ process that independently identifies and evaluates organizations ‘working to advance the opportunities of people in underserved communities.'”
Twenty-Five-Hundred Former Obama Workers Converge On Chicago
Marking the fifteenth anniversary of Barack Obama’s presidential win, around 1,500 former employees of the former president will converge in Chicago, reports the Sun-Times. “The former president will be interviewed by the hosts of ‘Pod Save America’ during the first-of-its-kind reunion, which is expected to draw thousands of Obamaworld veterans.” The conventioneers were part “of Obama’s two Chicago-based White House campaigns, his two terms as president, related political operations and his foundation. Reunion activities—formal and informal—run Thursday-Saturday. The main events are Friday at McCormick Place, taking place after the conclusion of the Obama Presidential Foundation’s 2023 Democracy Forum.”
Housekeepers Strike Downtown Hilton Over Tending To Guests’ Pets
“Housekeeping workers of the Hilton Garden Inn Downtown Chicago Riverwalk walked out on strike Sunday morning over their demand for a ‘fair pet policy,'” reports the Sun-Times wire. “Workers are demanding that management revert to the previous policy regarding guests with pets, the labor union, UNITE HERE Local 1, said… the policy would alert housekeepers at the beginning of their shift if there is a pet staying in the room they are assigned to clean.”
Musk Intends To Replace Banking With X
“Elon Musk wants X to be the center of your financial world, handling anything in your life that deals with money,” reports the Verge. Musk has outlined plans to create a financial hub before. He even renamed Twitter after his dot-com-boom-era online bank, X.com, which eventually became part of PayPal. He previously said the platform would offer high-yield money market accounts, debit cards, checks, and loan services, with the goal of letting users ‘send money anywhere in the world instantly and in real-time.’ His overarching goal is to launch by the end of next year. “When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk said during an all-hands meeting call. “If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”
