RETRIEVING DOCUMENT
Four days out, here is what the official story looks like from street level.
The GDA moved into the affected zone on Tuesday morning — not the Army Corps, not FEMA, not the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation. The GDA. Men in gray with no unit markings and laminated credentials that do not match any federal database I can find. I asked one of them, politely, who authorized this cleanup operation. He told me I was standing in an active incident zone and that I should move.
I moved. Then I came back. I come back every day.
What I can tell you is this: the city's own damage assessors were working the block at 0700 Tuesday. By 1100, they were gone. By 1130, the gray vehicles were there. By 1400, there was a jersey barrier system around a two-block radius of the main impact site and a cheerful sign on the barrier that said CHICAGO STRONG — REBUILDING TOGETHER.
The city is not doing the rebuilding.
There were 214 vehicles in the parking structures along Wacker between Michigan Avenue and Columbus Drive when the fight started. I know this because I obtained the garage attendance records before anyone thought to make those unavailable. Sixty-one are confirmed destroyed or unrecoverable. The owners have been contacted by an organization called the Urban Infrastructure Assistance Program, offered a settlement, and asked to sign a document that I am told — by one owner, who did not sign — includes a nondisclosure clause regarding the specific events of that afternoon.
I am going to say that again: they are asking people whose cars were destroyed in a superhuman brawl to agree not to talk about the superhuman brawl.
The woman I spoke to on Thursday — I will not use her name — lived on the sixteenth floor of a building on North Columbus. She had about thirty seconds of warning because her dog started barking before the first shockwave. She is now at her sister's place in Wicker Park. She has a voucher from the Urban Infrastructure Assistance Program and a phone number. She has called the number eleven times. No one has answered. The voicemail is full.
My audio from the afternoon of the incident corrupted between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. The raw file. On a device that has never, in four years of field work, produced a corrupted file. I still have the video. I still have the parking garage records. I have names.
Darius wants to leave. He says we got the story, the story is out, and standing outside a cordoned blast site is not journalism, it is grief. He is probably right about the last part.
But I keep thinking about the garage records. Someone is going to ask for those back. And when they do, I want to have already asked every question they do not want asked.
I do not know who was fighting. I know what they did to the block. I know that the city is not running this cleanup and is not saying why. I know that 214 cars became a settlement with a nondisclosure clause. I know that a woman is calling a number that does not answer.
That is the story. I am still in it.