Everything about Byrne memorable

Jane Byrne wore the most amazing high heels. In 1979, everything about the first woman mayor of Chicago was new. And memorable. Each time the petite Byrne walked into a City Hall press conference, women reporters in the room would clock her kicks. Charles Jourdan was Byrne’s brand of choice back then. The Frenchmade shoes were exquisite and expensive. And Byrne had the legs to carry them off.

But, like everything else about her, there was something contradictory about it at the same time.

Byrne was, in a lot of ways, a plain Jane. Tough, wary, not given to big smiles or warm embraces.

An outsider, she’d beaten the in- siders only to become one. She campaigned condemning the “evil cabal” of the two Eds, aldermen Edward Vrdolyak and Edward Burke. But once elected, she joined their club.

As political strategist David Axelrod put it Friday, “She was an imperfect vessel for the reform movement she led, and then betrayed. But she was absolutely fearless and, obviously, a trailblazer.”

There are so many Jane Byrne stories. But here’s the one I like the best.

Bill Griffin, a former Tribune reporter who today works as an attorney and lobbyist, was Byrne’s chief of staff back in 1981. He recalls the mayor driving by the Cabrini-Green housing project on the North Side one day where a lot of police vehicles had converged.

“She saw all the squads and police standing around talking,” said Griffin. “She pulls up, gets out of the car. . . . And sees a girl is sitting in the back seat of one of the squads.”

The girl had been raped.

To Byrne’s way of thinking, someone should have been attending to the girl or taken her to a hospital. “Something should have been happening other than her sitting in the back of a squad car,” said Griffin. “And so she came downtown, called me in, mad at the commander, wanted to fire him,

An outsider, she’d beaten the insiders only to become one.

and called the superintendent.”

According to Griffin, the furious mayor wanted to transfer the jurisdiction of Cabrini-Green to another district where she had more confidence in the gang crimes commander there.

When her advisers resisted, arguing it would create a logistical nightmare, Griffin describes Byrne as becoming even more “tough and ornery. She threw them all out. And that night, she moved into CabriniGreen.” It made national headlines. At the time, critics called it a publicity stunt. I never thought so. In covering Byrne’s move into the projects, I remember a small girl walking up to me at Cabrini and warning, “Don’t go in that building, lady. You’ll get raped.” I was astounded that a child who wasn’t more than 6 years old could speak with such authority about rape.

For her part, Byrne understood that if she moved into a gang-infested, violent place that a battalion of cops, an army of Streets and Sanitation workers, and the city’s news media would move in with her. It was a bold move. Something I will always remember about her.

And admire.