Judge orders Chicago to install audible crossing signals for the blind and visually impaired
A federal judge has ordered Chicago to install audible crossing signals at intersections with traffic lights to help people who are blind or have problems seeing to cross public streets.
The order would require the city to install at least 75 accessible pedestrian signals this year and more than 100 every year until at least 71% of intersections have the devices within 10 years.
All city intersections with traffic lights would have the audible crossing signals by the end of 2040. Disability Rights Advocates, the group that helped bring a lawsuit asking for the signals, welcomed the news as long overdue.
'With this proposed order, blind and low-vision pedestrians in Chicago are one step closer to being able to navigate the city's streets safely and independently, something they have been fighting to do for years,' Rachel Weisberg, supervising attorney with Disability Rights Advocates, told the Tribune in an email.
Peter Berg, who is blind and uses a guide dog to help commute from Naperville to Chicago, said the devices can be extremely helpful.
'If crossing signals are a good thing for sighted people, why wouldn't they be good for people who are blind or with low vision?' he asked. 'It's a matter of equality. Give me the same choice you're providing sighted people.'
The remediation plan the judge proposed last week comes about two years after a judge found that the city was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act for its lack of audible crossing signals.
The city has begun installing such devices but has just 85 at about 2,800 intersections with traffic lights. The devices typically are attached to poles in the sidewalk at street corners and emit a locator tone, with a button to activate them. They then beep or give verbal alerts when it's safe to cross the street, similar to flashing 'walk' and 'don't walk' signs.
U.S. District Judge LaShonda Hunt proposed that the city install the devices whenever it installs new or substantially modified traffic lights. She recommended prioritizing intersections where the city receives requests for the devices, as well as dangerous sites such as mid-block crossings and intersections where three streets cross.
The judge also called for prioritizing crossings near public transportation, hospitals, parks, schools, libraries, police stations, shopping areas, major cultural venues, organizations serving people with visual disabilities and seniors and government buildings.
Hunt recommended that the city use input from a citizen advisory committee and would let the city extend its final deadline or eliminate the final five years of installations if it shows it has provided 'meaningful access.'
City officials and the plaintiffs, who include blind and visually impaired people, and the American Council of the Blind of Metropolitan Chicago, are to go to court April 29 to propose any changes to the order and to recommend an independent monitor to oversee its implementation. Until then, the city is to begin implementing the order.
The judge wrote that she will enter a final order that 'strikes an appropriate balance between the available reasonable accommodations and the resulting financial and administrative burdens.'
The city Department of Transportation (CDOT) told the Tribune in a statement that it 'fully recognizes the importance of Accessible Pedestrian Signals in ensuring an accessible public way.'
City officials said they will incorporate the signals into all new traffic signal installations or modernizations and roadway reconstruction, with a citywide retrofit program to come. Last year, the city installed the devices at 36 locations, with 160 more in construction, design or procurement.
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Chicago Tribune
12-06-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Vintage Chicago Tribune: Unexpected finds in Chicago parks
Ah, it finally feels like summer in the city. We can't wait to spend as much time outside as possible. But did you know your favorite Chicago park might have a secret past? These are some of the unexpected things we found when looking through the Tribune's archives. In parks featuring lagoons, Park District officers were kept busy chasing poachers who fished without a permit. Some parks — Lincoln, Garfield and Washington among them — had holding cells in their field houses. The Park District police were consolidated into the Chicago Police Department at 12:01 a.m., Jan. 1, for the territorial border agreed to by the Pottawattomie and the U.S. government, this park formerly featured a zoo. The first animal housed there was a single black bear named Teddy. It was donated by Frank Kellogg, president of the now-defunct Park Avenue Park District. Pheasant, ducks and an opossum followed. More recently, varieties of goats, exotic farm chickens and roosters and an African water fowl called the one-acre zoo inside the 13-acre park home. There is now a nature center and a bird migration area at the park, but no the oldest park in Chicago, the 3-acre landmark was the landing spot for many people who lost their homes after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The space earned the name 'Bughouse Square' — American slang for a mental health facility — in the early 1900s when people would come to the park to stand on soapboxes and crates to give long lectures about their theories, passions and ideologies — no matter how addled, goofy or, indeed, sharp and smart. Some of the people who used to speak and argue in the park were famous: Carl Sandburg, Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs. Others were anonymous anarchists, dreamers, lunatics, poets and sprawling lakefront park is home to Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago History Museum, beaches and bodies. Burials took place in the Chicago City Cemetery, which was north of North Avenue along the lakefront and outside the then-city limits. Bodies were later relocated to other cemeteries due to a variety of factors — city expansion northward, health risks associated with rising lake levels and their proximity to decaying bodies buried in shallow graves, and a lawsuit concerning one of the cemetery's sections. But some were probably left behind, Helen Sclair discovered. Her suspicions were confirmed after visiting the Illinois Regional Archives Depository at Northeastern Illinois University. Tribune reporter Ron Grossman wrote, 'Sclair seems to have been the first to guess that the archive might contain records of the old lakefront cemetery. … Eventually, she found more than 600 relevant documents, had them photographed, then copied by hand their virtually illegible 19th century handwritings.' Today, the tomb of innkeeper Ira Couch is the most visible reminder of what the area was used for, but as many as 12,000 bodies might still lie below open-air 'floating hospitals' in Lincoln Park were built between the 1870s and the 1900s, and offered excursions from the piers on Lake Michigan. In 1914, the Chicago Daily News offered to fund a more permanent sanitarium building. Opened in 1921, the impressive Prairie-style structure was one of several Lincoln Park buildings designed by Dwight H. Perkins of the firm Perkins, Fellows, and Hamilton. Perkins, an important Chicago social reformer and Prairie School architect, designed buildings, including Café Brauer, the Lion House in the Lincoln Park Zoo and the North Pond Café. The impressive Chicago Daily News Fresh Air Sanitarium building was constructed in brick with a steel arched pavilion with 250 basket baby cribs, nurseries and rooms for older children. The breezes through the shelter were believed to cure babies suffering from tuberculosis and other diseases. Free health services, milk and lunches were provided to more than 30,000 children each summer until 1939, when the sanitarium closed. Major reconstruction of Lake Shore Drive led to the demolition of the building's front entrance. During World War II, the structure became an official recreation center for the United Service Organization. The Chicago Park District converted the building to Theatre on the Lake in the early 1950s. Today it's a lakefront restaurant and venue that hosts concerts and theater named for Stephen A. Douglas, the senator from Illinois and noted Lincoln debater, the Chicago Park District board of commissioners voted on Nov. 18, 2020, to officially rename this park in honor of abolitionists Anna Murray Douglass and Frederick Douglass. Though many parks around the city now have swimming pools, Douglass Park became the first to have one devoted to recreation. Immigrants who lived in this area in the mid-1890s petitioned to have Chicago's first outdoor public swimming pool built there. When it opened in August 1896, the Tribune reported 15,000 people braved bad weather to celebrate with a parade. 'The German, Polish, and Bohemian athletic societies in the city had charge of the exercises. Long before the hour set for the beginning of the procession hundreds of uniformed Turners and bicyclists gathered … It was estimated that 3,000 men were in line. The procession consisted of four divisions, each headed by a band.' A pool still exists in the park. It is used for day camps, classes and open were in bloom when the Washington Park Conservatory debuted at 56th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue in late 1897. Heated by exhaust steam piped in from a plant 700 feet away, the new 'floral castle' provided South Siders with a warm respite and lush surroundings inside the 425-foot-long hothouse constructed of stone, iron and glass. Thirty-foot-tall palm trees flourished under the conservatory's main dome and exotic fruits trees, ferns, grasses and vines were also mixed in. Washington Park long a site of change, controversyThe conservatory held exhibitions throughout the year, but plans were made in 1936, to tear it down. Its structure was deemed weak and too expensive to repair. A Park District police station was later constructed at 57th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center opened there in South Shore neighborhood was, like much of Chicago, a place where ethnic groups came and went. Yet above the club's porte-cochere, its arched entrance way, was a sign proclaiming that the South Shore Country Club was: 'For Members Only.' 'Until it closed in 1974, the club was, in the coded language of the time, 'restricted,'' Grossman wrote in 2016. 'Remember that this was a private club in its time and if you were Black or Jewish, forget about it,' a Chicago Park District official told the Tribune in 1984, when the club was renovated, prior to reopening as the South Shore Cultural Center. 'People who have never been here before will walk in and realize they are in the Taj Mahal.' South Shore: From exclusive country club to inclusive cultural centerThe club was worthy of such hyperbole. The main clubhouse, built in the then-tony Mediterranean Revival style, featured a cavernous main dining room and grand ballroom joined by a 'passaggio,' a broad and towering corridor. It was so long that three orchestras could play in different parts of the clubhouse without interfering with each other. Its facilities came to include a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts, a trap-shooting range, lawn-bowling courts and stables, bridle paths and a dressage ring for equestrian members. The club's Horse Show was the high point of Chicago's social season. In 1920, the club added a band shell to its music venues. The club reached its high point of a little more than 2,000 members in 1953. But membership declined as the neighborhood's demographics changed. In 1975, the club sold its property to the Chicago Park District. Years of squabbling followed over what to do with the site. Park District officials weren't eager to spend money on the clubhouse and athletic facilities. Maintenance had been neglected as the club's revenues shrank. 'Ironically, Blacks — many of whom are now fighting to preserve the structures — were barred from the grounds except to work,' the Tribune observed in 1977. In the end, the neighborhood won. The buildings and grounds were renovated and now host jazz festivals, the restaurant Nafsi, art exhibitions and lectures. Michelle and Barack Obama held their 1992 wedding reception there. Thanks for reading! Subscribe to the free Vintage Chicago Tribune newsletter, join our Chicagoland history Facebook group, stay current with Today in Chicago History and follow us on Instagram for more from Chicago's past.
Chicago Tribune
12-06-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Robert Brazil, CPS principal who pushed Socratic method of learning, dies
Robert Brazil was for many years the principal at Sullivan High School in the Rogers Park neighborhood, where he gained a reputation for implementing the Socratic method of teaching and leading efforts that improved student outcomes. 'I often say that children learn more by example than they do by instruction, and here was the living example on an ongoing basis at the elementary and senior high level,' said Carl Boyd, a Kansas City-based urban educator who in the early 1970s taught at Parkside Elementary School in the South Shore neighborhood, while Brazil was Parkside's principal. 'It was remarkable just how many educators depended upon his leadership.' Brazil, 86, died of complications from a rare type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma on May 11 at the University of Chicago Medical Center, said his daughter, Patrice. He was a Hyde Park resident. Born in Memphis, Brazil grew up on Chicago's South Side and attended Raymond Elementary School before graduating from Phillips High School. He received a bachelor's degree in physical education from Chicago Teachers College and then earned a master's degree in education from DePaul University in 1965. In 1978, he added a doctorate in education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Brazil's first teaching job was at Martha Ruggles Elementary School in the Grand Crossing neighborhood on the South Side, and he later taught at Paul Cornell Elementary School in Grand Crossing and then was the assistant principal at Nikola Tesla Elementary School in the Woodlawn neighborhood on the South Side. In 1971, Brazil became the principal at Parkside Elementary School in South Shore. 'I want to make this school a place where there are activities taking place which meet the interests and needs of the children,' Brazil told the Tribune in 1971. 'I want the school to be a place where the children want to come and be a part of — not something they come to because they have to.' In 1975, Brazil was named principal of Parker High School in the Englewood neighborhood. The school had been called out in a September 1974 Tribune series titled 'Inside Our Troubled Schools,' which described nodding off during class, students gambling in the cafeteria and the smell of marijuana wafting through hallways and restrooms. Brazil led Parker, which later became Robeson High School, until being named Sullivan's principal in 1977. In 1984, he won a grant under the Carnegie Grants Program for High School Improvement to fund the 'Paideia proposal,' an educational program developed in 1982 by philosopher Mortimer Adler and 21 other educators. The Paideia proposal was in essence a call for school reform, championing schools' revival of the Socratic seminar and urging a rigorous academic core curriculum regardless of students' backgrounds or levels. Brazil implemented the Paideia approach at Sullivan, beginning with a seminar in which teachers would question students to enlarge their understanding of the world. Brazil directed students to not only read great works but to talk about them and to think instead of having a traditional teacher-driven lecture. 'The program is an outlet for children who might not be stimulated by a more traditional curriculum,' Brazil told the Tribune in 1988. 'Some kids who are very bright cannot survive in our education system because it is too limiting. Some people think that Chicago Public Schools children can't learn. I wish those people could see these kids.' Brazil's partner, Lynnette Fu, taught French at Sullivan and then went on to become an assistant principal at Sullivan and then eventually to a role at Chicago Public Schools' central office. 'He not only had big ideas, but he made them work. A lot of people have ideas, but they might hand them off to someone else to implement, but he was the one who made them happen,' Fu said. 'He was a fantastic principal — very innovative.' Brazil's work paid off, with the school's enrollment gaining in standardized test scores each year. 'We're getting to the point where kids are learning well, not just based on scores but on how they feel about themselves,' Brazil told the Tribune in 1990. 'When they tell me they feel smart, it makes me feel good.' In 1989, Brazil was one of 20 Chicago Public School principals awarded the first annual Whitman Award for Excellence in Education Management from the Whitman Corp. 'My father genuinely loved teaching people new things. He was a born educator, but he could have been good at anything,' Patrice Brazil said. 'He loved being able to improve a school's performance and was always talking about how well the kids at his school were doing.' Brazil broadened his focus to oversee staff development for other schools following the Paideia program, and he founded the Paideia Institute of Hyde Park and served as the group's executive director. For teachers, Brazil also launched a series of immersion retreats on the Paideia proposal in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, as well as a graduate institute at St. John's College in Santa Fe, N.M. Brazil also worked with the National Board of Teacher Certification to help certify educators. Brazil wrote several books, including 'The Engineering of the Paideia Proposal' in 1988 and 'A Covenant for Change: The Paideia Manual,' which the University of Illinois published in 1991. Brazil also self-published a 100-page memoir in 2005 about his upbringing, 'Memoirs of Bronzeville.' After retiring from Sullivan in 1993, Brazil continued to train teachers in the Socratic method, his daughter said. A marriage to Marilyn Wallace-Brazil ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter and Fu, Brazil is survived by a son, Alan; two granddaughters; a sister, Vera Green. Services were held.
Chicago Tribune
09-06-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Chicago fire: Flaming saganaki sparks interest worldwide decades after its Greektown origin
Last winter, at Chicago's Greek Islands (200 S. Halsted St.), our Greektown dinner started with a bang — more accurately, a whoosh. A server carried a small black pan of blazing cheese to the table as startled diners burst into applause for what is the Windy City's notoriously combustible appetizer: flaming saganaki. In Chicago, the dish is a ritual. It's dramatic, it's delicious, and — let's be honest — it's also a little absurd in the best possible way. The word saganaki comes from sagani, a small, two-handled Greek pan. In Greece, the dish is straightforward: firm, dry cheeses such as kasseri, feta or halloumi are pan-fried until golden. No fire. No flair. Just cheese doing what cheese does best, served with crusty bread. In Chicago, we lightly coat the square or triangular cut of cheese in flour and fry it in a little olive oil until crisp and golden. Then we flip it once, warm it through, splash it with brandy (usually ouzo or Metaxa), light it up, and before setting it on the table, flamboyantly extinguish the flames with a lemon squeeze and a hearty shout of 'Opa!' That word — part cheer, part celebration, part call to 'let's dance!' — adds the perfect exclamation point. So, where did this fiery tradition begin? Depends on whom you ask. Chris Liakouras of the now-shuttered Parthenon restaurant claimed in a 1979 Tribune interview that he invented flaming saganaki in 1968. He described sitting at a table with three friends when the idea for a new menu item was born. 'Why don't you try flaming the cheese?' one of the ladies suggested. And just like that, an appetizer exploded into legend. But Petros Kogeones of Diana's, another Greektown fixture, had a different story. In 1991, he told the Tribune that he and his brother were flambéing cheese as far back as the early 1960s. According to Kogeones, they'd set up tables outside their family grocery, splash brandy on sizzling cheese, light it all on fire, and shout 'Opa!' Eventually, perhaps to stake his claim, Kogeones even renamed the restaurant Diana's Opa. Regardless of who struck the first match to brandy-doused cheese, one thing is clear: Flaming saganaki was a hit. And honestly, when we're traveling and we order saganaki, we're always a little disappointed when it doesn't arrive in a ball of fire. There is, however, increasingly little chance of being served saganaki sans flames, at least in the U.S.: Restaurants from Brooklyn to Malibu are figuring out that brandy and a match might be the not-so-secret ingredients to serving a lot of the crowd-pleasing saganaki. 'The flames were a smart marketing idea,' says Louie Alexakis, owner of the Avli restaurants in Chicago. 'In the 1950s and '60s, a lot of Greek restaurant workers in Chicago had fine dining backgrounds. They saw the wow factor of tableside flambé — things like crepes Suzette or bananas Foster. Flaming cheese was the next step.' Alexakis still flames saganaki at Avli, but also offers a more modern take: saganaki served with spiced fig chutney — still delicious, and less likely to set off the sprinklers. Not everyone is on board with this fiery New World opener to a traditional Greek dinner in Chicagoland. Ted Maglaris, founder of Mana in LaGrange (88 LaGrange Road), said, 'We chose not to flame our pan-fried saganaki but rather to honor the traditional Greek preparation, inspired by recipes from mothers in Greece, which is the inspiration for our restaurant's name, Mana. Flaming saganaki is a relatively recent tradition that began in Chicago, not in Greece. Our goal is to provide an authentic Greek experience, staying true to how saganaki is traditionally enjoyed in Greece.' Flashback: Memories of when Greektown was 'a mile long and 24 hours'With the current eagerness to sample 'authentic' preparations of Greek, Italian, Mexican and other traditional national foods, it's understandable that some restaurants might prefer to serve saganaki the way their mothers and grandmothers did, no matches or accelerants required. Other restaurants may be toning down the theatrics for safety reasons — turns out, flaming cheese and crowded dining rooms make for a risky combination. Somewhat surprisingly, flaming saganaki is now also catching on in Greece, especially in tourist-heavy restaurants, such as the Athens Yacht Club. Though such fiery presentations of cheese are not common in Greece, some travelers have come to expect saganaki to be flaming. And who can blame them? There's something undeniably fun about turning a simple cheese dish into a full-blown pyrotechnic display. Flaming saganaki isn't just food — it's dinner, entertainment, and a tiny adrenaline rush all in one.
