Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company
The
Boston Globe
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August 25, 1997, Monday, City Edition
SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1
LENGTH: 1644 words
HEADLINE: Gateway to a new America;
Illinois community defends its barricade to 'unwelcome' outsiders
BYLINE: By Michael Grunwald, Globe Staff
DATELINE: ROSEMONT, Ill.
BODY: As usual, this tiny suburb will be crammed with visitors this week. Sheryl Crow
and the Gipsy Kings will perform at Rosemont's 4,300-seat theater. The World
Wrestling Federation will shake up the town's 19,000-seat sports arena. And a
massive antique show is opening here at the
nation's 12th largest convention center.
With only 4,000 permanent residents and a whopping 3.4 million annual
visitors, Rosemont may be the most hospitable community in America. But the
numbers do not account for another distinction: Rosemont is the first American
town to build a
gate around its main residential area. Crow may be welcome in Rosemont, but if
she wants to call on a local friend, she'll have to explain herself to the man
in the guard house unless she has a resident sticker.
Rosemont is on one level a paradox, a
big city within a small town, a community that embraces outsiders while
discouraging them from getting too close. But some see it more as a parable, a
municipal case study in ambivalence toward strangers. Rosemont may contain the
first public
gated
community, but more than 8 million Americans now live in private ones. Crime is falling
across the country, but homeowners seem even more afraid of it.
"What's happening in Rosemont is what's happening in America," said Evan McKenzie, a University of Illinois professor who studies gated
communities.
"People want all the economic benefits of outsiders in their towns, but they
don't want the social problems. Essentially, they want to be parasites."
People in
Rosemont see themselves as worried parents, not parasites. They see their gate
as a sensible civic improvement, not a symbolic betrayal of the social
contract. About half the town lives inside the gate, which surrounds the town's
single-family homes and an apartment building for elderly
residents. Although crime was not a problem before it was built, people feel
even safer now. Sure, many residents outside the gate resent it, but their main
complaint is that they wish they had one around their own homes.
"Look, the world has gone nuts, and there are a lot of
real wackos out there," said police Lieutenant Joseph Peterson.
"People feel a lot better when they know who's in their neighborhood. You can't
blame them for that."
Rosemont was the brainchild of Donald E. Stephens, who helped incorporate the
town in 1956 and has been mayor ever since. Where others saw
swamp land, he saw a visitor magnet bordering the new O'Hare International
Airport, just 15 miles outside Chicago along major highways. An old-fashioned
political boss - he has been twice indicted but never convicted - as well as a
visionary, he now presides over
a village empire with a $ 107 million budget. He does not talk to the press
much, and was unavailable for comment last week.
Thanks to the visitors, this middle-class town is always awash in cash.
Rosemont owns and operates the 700,000-square-foot convention center, now being
expanded for the seventh time since 1975, the Horizon arena, home to a minor
league hockey team and DePaul University basketball, and the Rosemont Theater,
which hosted Jay Leno when
"The Tonight Show" came to Chicago.
The cash cows are everywhere. Rosemont rakes in a 6 percent
tax every time someone stays in one of its 4,700 hotel rooms, and $ 8 every
time someone parks at the convention center. Even a fancy health club in the
gated subdivision is town-owned.
"Obviously, this is a very unique town," said Rosemont finance
director John Hochstettler.
"I don't have to spend all my time worrying where the next dollar is coming from."
Or where it is going. Rosemont has an Italian marble staircase in its town
office and an artificial waterfall along River Road. It sponsors a nationally
ranked drum and
bugle corps, to the tune of $ 125,000 a year. It employs an army of part-timers
who seem to be mowing grass or planting flowers or removing litter wherever you
turn. Prosecutors have always suspected that the town has somehow subsidized
Stephens' antique car collection and far-flung travel
habits as well, but they have never been able to prove it.
In any case, when a tiny village can afford 67 full-time public safety officers
and the nation's largest auxiliary police force despite some of the lowest
property taxes in the state, it can also
afford to put two cops in guard houses 24 hours a day. So in 1995, with little
fanfare, the town erected a beige wrought-iron fence around the subdivision. A
few residents complained, and the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to
sue,
but the issue died down quickly.
To avoid legal problems, the town has created a
"soft gate," designed to monitor but not necessarily bar access to the subdivision. The
tollbooth-style entry points bear little resemblance to the Berlin Wall-style
fortresses at some private
gated communities, and the Donald E. Stephens Park alongside the main gate
provides a cheerful burst of color. A sign at the gate reads
"SAFETY CHECK POINT," and warns that visitors will be asked their destination, but the fine print
adds that if they don't say, they will still be
allowed to pass.
What the fine print fails to mention is that visitors who do refuse to state
their purpose, or who are deemed suspicious for some other reason, will be
followed by a squad car until they leave the subdivision. Nor does the sign
mention that every car that passes through the gates is videotaped.
"We
live in our own little world," said 75-year-old Bud Lemke, a retired Navy engineer.
"We don't want to see all those kids around here, driving those cars, going
where they shouldn't. The gate makes us feel a lot safer."
Peterson said the gate
seems to have deterred thieves from this neighborhood, although they were never
very active here in the first place. It is just a typical suburban cluster of $
150,000 to $ 300,000 homes on half-acre lots, a community of stockbrokers and
teachers and almost every cop in town. But the gate seems to be
striking a chord, tapping into a fierce desire to keep the wrong kind of
outsiders from getting in. There are still Neighborhood Watch signs posted in
the subdivision, and even visitor-industry officials like Rosemont Theater
manager Ron Stern and Rosemont Convention Center manager James
Freeman say they appreciate the additional security.
"It's good to keep an eye on people who don't belong here," said Michelle Biondo, a 17-year-old camp counselor.
"Yeah, like gang members!" chimed in Greg Roh, her 11-year-old
cousin. Just then, a neighbor walks onto her porch and spots a reporter and
photographer she doesn't recognize.
"Do you people have permission to be in this village?" she demands.
Greg is not the only neighborhood resident who mentions gang members, and
fears of car thieves, child molesters, house burglars, con artists,
kidnappers and
"psychos with Uzis" also come up in conversations around the subdivision. The gate, everyone
agreed, is a good way to convince bad guys to go somewhere else. It is also a
good way to shut out the irritants of suburban life.
"These people going to conventions or whatever, they used to
stop me every five minutes to ask directions," said Jim Marnos, 55, a retired salesman who lives near the gate.
"It got so annoying, I couldn't even mow my lawn. I tell you this, they don't
bother me anymore."
Teresa Medina has a
slightly different take on the gate. She also lives in Rosemont, but outside
the gate, in a run-down rental development behind the Horizon arena. The
residents there are mostly Hispanic laborers in Rosemont's visitors industry, a
sharp contrast to the upwardly mobile white community
down the road. There actually are some gang problems here, and Medina wonders
why her neighborhood does not get 24-hour police guards.
"I don't think it's right," said Medina, a 19-year-old telemarketer.
"We have all these problems here, but they get the gate and the protection."
But Medina does
not think the town should tear down the gate; she thinks it should build one
around her own yellow-brick complex. Her neighbor Yisell Navarett, a
28-year-old real estate agent, feels the same way. She doesn't like it when
drunks crowd around her apartment
building at night, and she doesn't like it when strangers park in her spot
during Horizon events.
"A gate would be perfect for this community," Navarett said.
"Just because we rent doesn't mean we shouldn't have a safe place for our kids."
Peterson says the gate only works
around the subdivision because its streets all dead-end anyway. The other
neighborhoods in town all have through streets. In any case, local officials
are focused on other projects. The town is creating a linked system of sky
bridges, so that conventioneers would never have to go outside
while they're in Rosemont. Stephens is also lobbying the state for permission
to build a casino, to attract even more visitors. Garth Brooks, the Rockettes
and the annual sport fishing show are coming to town. And there are plans to
build a new facility for the Donald E. Stephens Museum.
"This really is
an incredible town," said Freeman, the director of the convention center.
"I can see why someone might think we were trying to exclude people, but it's
not like that. We welcome visitors to Rosemont."
To critics, though, Rosemont's gate is a reminder of a host of troubling
trends. Overblown
fears of crime. The retreat of the middle class from public institutions.
Declining civic spirit. And above all, increased suspicion of outsiders in
America - even when they are a community's bread and butter.
"Rosemont is unique right now, but I'm sure we'll see more and more towns doing
the
same thing," said Mary Gail Snyder, co-author of
"Fortress America," an upcoming book about gated communities.
"It's a crazy situation, because they never even had crime to begin with. But
paranoia is a powerful force."
GRAPHIC: PHOTO MAP, GLOBE PHOTO/TODD BUCHANAN / A car passes through one of the two
guarded gates that secure the town of Rosemont, Ill., located 15 miles west of
downtown Chicago.