Let's face it -- Mayor Rahm Emanuel has no idea how to handle Chicago's "Rooftop Reverend," Pastor Corey Brooks. For the last 10 weeks, Brooks has been living in a dark green tent atop the now-shuttered Super Motel at the corner of 66th and King Drive.
Back in 2010, Brooks and his congregation began their fight to get the city to shut down that same motel. The 43-year-old pastor said the run-down blonde building, which sits across the street from his New Beginnings Church, had long been a neighborhood hotspot for drugs, prostitution and gun violence. But even after Brooks and his flock convinced the city to close the motel, the vacant building continued to be a hub of criminal activity.
And Brooks continued to bury young men who were shot to death in that same neighborhood.
That's why, on November 22, 2011, Brooks decided to take it (quite literally) to the next level, pitching his tent on the motel's second-story roof. Since then he's come down from the roof just three times -- twice to officiate at the funerals of young shooting victims from his neighborhood, and once to accompany a mother to a local hospital to identify the bullet-riddled body of her slain son.
Brooks plans to remain in his tent on the roof until he raises $450,000 to purchase, and then demolish, the building. To date, he's raised about $290,000. (You can make a donation at the pastor's "Project Hood" website.) Once Brooks gets the motel torn down, he'll move to the next phase of the project: building a much-needed youth and community center on the same plot of land. He figures that part of the project will run close to $15 million, and he's already looking for partners.
The pastor insists that kids in his resource-starved neighborhood need and deserve at least one safe place to play. Brooks' youngest child is a 10-year-old boy, and Brooks told me that "there's not a chance in hell I'd let him play outside in this neighborhood." He also said that the need for a local youth and community center increased exponentially this week after Hull House filed for bankruptcy. Hull House had, for decades, operated the Parkway Community House, just blocks from Brooks' church, but Parkway closed its doors for good last Friday.
So why has Emanuel permitted Brooks to stay on the motel's roof?
Do you think for a Wilmette minute that the mayor would allow a group from Occupy Chicago to camp out for weeks on a run-down rooftop to protest, for example, the growing and largely unchecked influence of World Business Chicago in our city? Not a chance.
And just try to picture Emanuel allowing a handful of South Side mothers from the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) to pitch a tent atop an abandoned building in Bronzeville to protest the mayor's latest round of proposed school closings in their neighborhood. Those moms would have been cuffed and fingerprinted before you could count to UNO.
That's why it's been fascinating to watch City Hall's (largely) hands-off approach to Brooks over the last ten weeks.
The mayor has already demonstrated that he won't hesitate to arrest the Occupy folks. After all, their complaints focus, in large part, on the shortcomings of the "free market" -- a system that has always served Emanuel well.
And the moms from KOCO would undoubtedly get locked up because the mayor would insist that he has a plan -- however ill-conceived -- for their schools, and that their illegal rooftop protests amount to an obstruction of his plan and a threat to public safety.
But to arrest a dynamic, young African-American pastor for speaking out against gun violence while trying to raise money so that the kids in his neighborhood will have one safe place to play? Well, even the mayor who gave Chicago the "sit down and shut up" ordinance knows enough to keep that story out of the national press.
To be sure, the city has played some games with the pastor. When I visited Brooks in his tent last week, he was busy giving an earful to a city representative about a preliminary injunction that the city's attorneys had obtained on January 19.
The injunction, as written, effectively barred Brooks' youngest son from visiting his dad on the roof. It also limited to two the number of people who could visit Brooks at any one time, thereby making it more difficult for the pastor to meet with the media or strategize with members of the community. By January 25, however, the city was back in court asking to modify the very injunction it had argued for just days earlier. As a result, Brooks' young son can once again visit his dad, and the city will now allow up to five people on the roof at any one time. Go figure.
Brooks is certainly happy to work with the mayor and other city officials on issues affecting his community, but I doubt he'll ever be confused with one of those Chicago preachers who hands out cash-filled envelopes to rent-a-protesters in order to ensure VIP seating at the mayor's next inter-faith prayer breakfast.
The "Rooftop Reverend" seems to be cut from a different cloth. He's keeping his proverbial powder dry for the moment, but I know he is willing and entirely able to ask the tough questions -- like why the current administration was willing to cough up $7 million in TIF funds to build a high-end grocery store in Greektown (across the street from a Dominick's, no less), when the young people in his neighborhood lack something as basic as a safe place to play.
The mayor and the pastor may reside in the same city, but they live in two different worlds. If you doubt me, just think back to January 3, 2012.
That's the day the mayor, discussing his family's recent South American vacation with the City Hall press corps, told reporters that "when you... grow up again, you want to be an Emanuel child. It's unbelievable."
Meanwhile, just ten miles and one world away, Pastor Brooks was spending his 43rd day in a tent atop the Super Motel thinking about how unbelievable it is that he keeps burying kids who never get a chance to grow up.