What The Pullman National Monument Needs Now Is Fewer 'Partners'

PULLMAN — For three months, "home" was never far from wherever we parked the truck.

A skinny driveway in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Behind the gate of a mansion in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. The Hotel Monteleone garage in New Orleans. A 30-acre farm in Gilmer, Texas. A bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Clemente, California. On the bank of gold-bearing Cow Creek in Glendale, Oregon. And so many other spots on a 12,300-mile storytelling journey of America as we got a glimpse of America's beauty and the various states of crises in our country.

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The rise of expressway shootings in Atlanta. Worker shortages on Florida's gulf coast. The swampy start of hurricane season in Louisiana. Homeless encampments invade the sidewalk outside City Hall in Austin, Texas, and line the Venice Beach boardwalk in California. Wildfires choke the West with smoke.

There's nothing like some other city's troubles to cloud memories of woes back home.

That could be why, at least for the last mile of our journey, Chicago's most nagging problems — shootings, murders and public corruption, that is — didn't overshadow things that obviously had changed for the better.

Freshly planted highway signs pointed the way to the Pullman National Monument on the eve of a milestone moment in my historic neighborhood.

A nearly finished Culver's restaurant had popped up on a long-vacant corner. Peeling paint leading to the 111th Street Metra station had been scraped off and freshly coated in "Pullman green." City crews even pruned trees that were damaged by wind storms ... last year.

We arrived just in time to see the ugly fence separating my neighbors from the historic Pullman clock tower's grounds finally vanish before the grand opening of the Pullman National Monument visitor center — $35 million in renovations complete with manicured parkland, interactive exhibits and a gift shop where you can buy Pullman stickers, Pullman magnets and toy Pullman trains.

Other things unfortunately remained the same.

As we unpacked the truck on our first afternoon back in town, gun blasts rang out a few blocks away, where warring gang factions have contributed to the 182 shooting incidents and 42 murders that 5th District police have responded to so far this year. Citywide, there have already been more shootings and murders in eight months than there were in all of 2019.

I tried to keep a positive attitude during the national monument grand opening festivities. But politicians, bureaucrats and self-proclaimed neighborhood saviors told carefully curated tales that gloss over uglier truths of my neighborhood's history — stuff that "local" reporters sent to write about the celebration could never recognize — reviving in me a cynicism that had been suppressed during a summer on America's most scenic roads.

It's wonderful to have the federal government and a collection of rich folks swoop in to fund the first steps of a high-class preservation effort.

But there's no forgetting that for more than twice as long as the 16 years that I've lived in Pullman, our city and state government neglected the factory town that changed luxury passenger train travel, gave birth to the labor movement and America's first Black union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Still, the Pullman National Monument gets touted as "partnership" park, which boosters repeated as often as possible.

Maybe you have to live here to know that's a half-truth that aims to highlight good intentions and erase decades of unfulfilled promises and wasted public funds, sell folks on the unfunded promise of a brighter future and feed the egos that populate competing neighborhood groups.

One partner, for instance, is the Pullman State Historic Site that for decades has done the bare minimum and spent the least amount of money to keep the still shuttered Hotel Florence from caving in on itself.

Six years after former President Barack Obama designated the neighborhood a national monument, the state-owned Queen Anne-style hotel visited by business titans, a U.S. President and European royalty still isn’t open to the public for tours, or even Sunday tea on the veranda.

What's the hold up on opening the Hotel Florence? I asked at a news conference.

Um, well, uh, is a pretty accurate paraphrase of answers I got from Illinois Department of Natural Resources staffers.

The "vastly improved" shuttered hotel needs a a $300,000 fire-supression system, which along with cash for additional staff remains among unfunded requests standing in the way of a Hotel Florence revival, according to IDNR director Colleen Callahan.

"We are hopeful that we will be able to open to the public in a couple years," she said. "I'm not going to say that we are going to open in two years. But our goal would be that we would be there in a couple years."

Maybe in a couple of years? That's a disgrace. Especially given that powerful Democrats who could do something about it, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch, showed up at the national monument to participate in the Labor Day dog and pony show.

Pritzker pandered to organize labor with talk of preserving the "legacy" of Pullman striking workers that the historic neighborhood can "impart to its visitors, and must." He didn't mention how his administration continues to maintain the state's long legacy of sitting around waiting for somebody else to revive and redevelop a historic jewel on Chicago's notoriously neglected corner of the far South Side.

Other Pullman National Monument partners hailed as heroes on grand-opening weekend also danced around controversies that stood in the way of progress.

The Historic Pullman Foundation, for instance, has been the do-nothing landlord of Market Hall — once the neighborhood's business hub where famed lawyer Clarence Darrow delivered his landmark speech on the "eight-hour day and how to obtain it" — that remains a ruin even after the group spent more than a million in state and city grants.

City officials in 2002 blocked the founder of A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, Lyn Hughes, from receiving a $2 million grant to purchase the still-vacant Pullman fire house, citing lacking leadership and repeated financial miscues. A preservation group that Hughes formed defaulted on a loan taken against the grant and declared bankruptcy.

It's the same ol' players jockeying for relevance and control of Pullman's historic properties, archives and a piece of what everybody hopes is a tourism boon spurred by federal intervention.

Stories for another day, perhaps. Meanwhile, my neighborhood waits for a too-long-delayed revival that might push redevelopment beyond Pullman's borders to the Roseland neighborhood and beyond.

Only U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly have a solution that would expedite things — a pair of bills introduced in Congress that would establish Pullman as a National Park.

That move would eliminate the need for the National Park Service to partner with the state of Illinois, or anybody else.

It would pave the way for the National Park System to acquire and revitalize under utilized historic properties with funding, expertise and leadership that tourists who visit George Pullman's factory town — and the people who call it home — deserve.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

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