Maggie Daley changed the face of Chicago

Bridgeport, the workweek has ended, and Schaller's Pump is hopping. Families and friends are sitting around tables eating fried fish and prime rib. Other patrons are clustered at the huge oak bar. Gerald, a skinny, grizzled fellow wearing a Chicago Recycling Company cap, is at the bar, pounding down $2.25 martinis. He takes them customized-—that is, Jill Schaller, the pretty young barkeep, a direct descendant of the restaurant's founders, serves his packed to the gills with olives. “I don’t know if I like the gin better or the olives,” he says.


Schaller's was founded more than 100 years ago, about the time the family of Mayor Richard M. Daley took up residence in Bridgeport. The restaurant is situated across the street from the headquarters of the 11th Ward Regular Democratic Organization, and for that reason it’s the most political saloon in a neighborhood famed for its political talent. Bridgeport turns out politicians the way certain small towns in Georgia or Texas turn out beauty-pageant winners—the neighborhood has produced five Chicago mayors, including four straight from 1933 to 1979.


It was home to the current mayor, too, until last December, and the people of Schaller's Pump think they know why they lost their latest favorite son to a tonier neighborhood to the north: Maggie Daley, the mayor’s wife.


“People feel absolutely that Maggie is behind the move out of Bridgeport,” says one neighborhood resident. “She’s wanted to move for some time. I think he’s very neighborhood oriented—obvious1y, growing up in the neighborhood—where she's not. People just sort of accept it if she doesn’t want to be here. They think, Well, that’s their business. That’s what it should be—their business.”


The work with city kids was the most prominent and will capture most of the media notice over the next few days. In a town where far too many teenagers never make it to their first legal drink, there can be no better cause than trying to nurture and grow young people.


But at least as important was Ms. Daley's dedication to grabbing Chicago by its rusty old belt and transforming it into something like Barcelona or London — truly urbs in horto.


One of my favorite stories about the Daleys is how Maggie persuaded the mayor early in his tenure to tour Paris one summer. It wasn't too long afterward that he with vigor began rolling out planter medians in the streets, gardens in the parks, mosaics on the walls of underpasses and the like.


"The mayor had the will, but Maggie and her team really did a lot of the homework and created the agenda for beautification," says former Alderman Mary Ann Smith (48th), who headed the City Council Committee on Parks and Recreation until her recent retirement. "She could see what a city really could be."


At the same time, she pushed and pushed hard for arts and culture — some of it for the brie-and-chardonnay set, but much of it for all of Chicago. Think the music fests in the parks, each of them free of charge.


Did all of this have a cost? You bet. Will it pay off (Millennium Park is the prime example)? I think so.


I'm not sure how much of what occurred was part of a scripted design, beyond beauty and culture for their own sake. But beauty and culture were critical to the world-class service center Mr. Daley positioned Chicago to be, crucial because they imply safety and security and because they help attract the bright young talent that can live anywhere.


Only Mr. Daley and his late wife could tell you exactly which of them did what. But my bet is that she was responsible for most, sanding the hard edge not only off of Chicago but off of her son-of-Bridgeport husband.