Whose Drive? Our Drive!
Let the people vote on renaming LSD
Anecdotal and other nonscientific evidence is telling me that the move to rename Lake Shore Drive is deeply unpopular with the public.
After I wrote in this space last week about the seemingly unstoppable momentum in the City Council to put the name of founding settler Jean Baptiste Point DuSable on this region’s most distinctive thoroughfare, my email and messages on social media ran heavily against the idea. The response in letters to the editor has been similarly negative.
I posted a poll and found that self-identified Chicago residents among the nearly 500 respondents were opposed to the renaming by roughly a 3 to 1 margin, and self-identified nonresidents were opposed more than 4 to 1.
I wrote last week that “DuSable Drive” has the advantage of being distinctive and fitting, but I’m fine with the existing name “and I’d vote to keep it if there were a ballot referendum on the change.”
Which got some readers thinking. Why not a referendum? An actual vote in which the public would decide what to call the signature roadway that knits the North and South sides of the city together and offers spectacular skyline vistas and views of our parks.
I’m usually not a fan of government by referendum. It’s best to outsource decisions about often complicated policy issues to representatives who have the time to analyze them and cast what we hope are balanced and well-informed votes free from the passions of the moment and the impulses of mob rule.
But this is not a complicated policy issue. An alderman has no more insight, wisdom or perspective than you or I do about the proper name for a road. And since there’s obviously no rush here — the first proposal to turn Lake Shore Drive into DuSable Drive was introduced 28 years ago — we should delay the upcoming City Council vote and conduct a plebiscite to coincide with the primary elections next March.
For Chicagoans only. While I appreciate the sentiments of out-of-towners, it’s our street and should be our choice.
Moneyed interests with strong feelings on the issue would no doubt launch campaigns to sway voters. They’d start with inspiration and uplift. But then, as the debate intensified and sentiments got raw, both sides would go negative.
I imagine it playing out something like this:
Positive commercial for Lake Shore Drive
Background music: Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah’s “Lake Shore Drive.”
Video: High-rise and beach views as seen from a car window.
Voice-over: There ain’t no road just like it. Our city’s signature thoroughfare.
Video: Quick cuts of scenes from “When Harry Met Sally,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and other movies that have featured the drive.
Man on the street interview subject: “The name is perfect. Lake (quick video of sailboats on the water with the drive in the foreground). Shore (bicyclists and joggers passing sunbathers on a busy summer day). Drive (high-speed nighttime video of headlights and taillights streaking around the curves at Oak Street).
Woman on the street: It’s tradition. It’s pure Chicago. I smile whenever I hear the name. (huge smile)
Voice-over as the music swells: Always and forever, Lake Shore Drive.
Positive commercial for DuSable Drive
Background music: Lilting fiddle tune recalling frontier days.
Video: Drone shot of the Chicago River with the modern skyline dissolving into a drawing of the old trading post on the site of modern-day Pioneer Court, then dissolving again into a drawing of DuSable.
Voice-over: Some call him the Father of Chicago. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable was our first nonnative settler, a man who saw the promise in this area and put down roots here. His trading post and homestead at the mouth of the river were the seed from which our great city grew.
Video: As the background music shifts into “My Kind of Town,” we see quick shots of local landmarks such as the Museum of Science and Industry, the Willis Tower, Wrigley Field and Millennium Park, as well as neighborhood festivals and parades.
Voice-over: A Black man originally from Haiti, DuSable represents the proud diversity of modern Chicago as well as the entrepreneurial spirit that built it.
Video: The sweep of Lake Shore Drive seen from the air to the tune of “Sweet Home Chicago.”
Voice-over: What more fitting honor than to put his name on the greatest boulevard in the world? DuSable Drive. It’s about time.
Attack commercial against Lake Shore Drive
Video: A tweedy, professorial type seated at a desk in a booklined study.
Professor with a touch of disgust in her voice: “Whoever named Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive showed an utterly appalling lack of imagination.”
Video: The screen begins to fill with photos of street signs from all over America, each one reading “Lake Shore Drive.” The photos quickly grow more and more numerous and smaller and smaller until we pan out and we see that they have made a pixilated image of the letters “LSD” inside a circle with a slash through it.
Voice-over announcer: Easy. Trite. Boring. Every hamlet with a puddle in it has a Lake Shore Drive. More like Lake Snore Drive.
Sound effects: Heavy snoring, followed by the ringing of an old fashioned alarm clock.
Voice-over: Wake up, Chicago. We aren’t an easy, trite, boring city. Just say no to LSD.
Attack commercial against DuSable Drive
Background music: Gloomy horror-film soundtrack.
Image: The least flattering drawing of DuSable available, possibly digitally manipulated to make him appear sinister.
Voice-over: Sure, DuSable set up shop in what is now Chicago. For a while. Just 20 years or so. Historians say they aren’t exactly sure. But we do know he eventually sold out ...
On-screen graphic: Red block letters on a black background yell “Sell out!”
Voice-over: He sold his Chicago settlement and spent the last 18 years of his life in St. Charles, Missouri .... Missouri!
Image: Map showing that St. Charles is about 300 miles from Chicago.
Voice-over with matching images: There’s already a Chicago park named for him. Also a high school, a harbor and a museum. Now some people want to give him Lake Shore Drive as well.
Background music screeches and goes silent.
Voice-over: DuSable? How about Don’t Sable?
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet was “It should be called ‘Couch Mix’ because I’m guessing less than 1% of it is actually eaten on a trail,” by @RickAaron.
The poll appears at chicagotribune.com/zorn where you can read all the finalists. For an early alert when each new poll is posted, sign up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicagotribune.com/newsletters.
Join me and the other regular panelists every week on The Mincing Rascals, a news-review podcast from WGN-plus that posts Thursday afternoons.