Amid renewed national attention to the dangers of lead poisoning, hundreds of Chicagoans have taken the city up on its offer of free testing kits to determine if they are drinking tap water contaminated with the brain-damaging metal.
A Tribune analysis of the results shows lead was found in water drawn from nearly 70 percent of the 2,797 homes tested during the past two years. Tap water in 3 of every 10 homes sampled had lead concentrations above 5 parts per billion, the maximum allowed in bottled water by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Alarming amounts of the toxic metal turned up in water samples collected throughout the city, the newspaper’s analysis found, largely because Chicago required the use of lead service lines between street mains and homes until Congress banned the practice in 1986.
The testing kit results provide the most conclusive evidence yet of widespread hazards that have remained hidden for decades. Yet as Mayor Rahm Emanuel borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to overhaul the city’s public water system, Chicago is keeping lead service lines in the ground.
50 years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.
His death set off more than 100 riots across the country, including the most devastating civil disturbance in Chicago’s history.
Today, a difficult question remains: Why are pockets of Chicago’s West Side still decimated?
Chicago Police Officer Henry Davis was responsible for helping rescue 17 people in a fire on May 27, 1959. Davis, 34, and an ex-firefighter, discovered the fire at 9 E. 18th St. while walking his beat. He ran inside and began rousing the residents. Photo by Jack Mulcahy.
The former president’s portrait features flowers in the background: chrysanthemums referencing the official flower of Chicago, jasmine evoking his native Hawaii and African blue lilies in memory of his late father. The former first lady’s shows her in a long flowing sleeveless black and white dress embellished with geometric shapes by designer Michelle Smith’s label, Milly.
Alice Sousta, left, and Blanche Goodman, right, two of the star performers among the “feminine court stars” at the Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works in 1929.
Illinois has the nation's third-largest population of immigrants covered by DACA.
Who are these so-called Dreamers? The Tribune’s Abel Uribe photographed more than 40 people from a dozen countries to better understand.
Over the last 17 years, at least 75 women have been strangled or smothered in Chicago and their bodies dumped in vacant buildings, alleys, garbage cans, snow banks. Arrests have been made in only a third of the cases, according to a first-ever analysis by the Tribune.
While there are clusters of unsolved strangulations on the South and West sides, police say they’ve uncovered no evidence of a serial killer at work. If they are right, 50 murderers have gotten away with their crime.
Fifty people who used belts, bras, ropes, packing tape or their bare hands to kill these women. Fifty families still looking for justice for a mother, a sister, a daughter.
It has mostly been a silent vigil. There have been few news stories and even fewer memorials or other public gestures that would have focused attention on these women and how they died.
The Tribune began reviewing their cases while following up on the largely ignored story of a woman strangled last summer, her body dumped along a curb on the West Side. We wanted to find out how many other women had been strangled and abandoned: Who were they and had their killers been caught?
There’s something interesting in that showcase, but Mrs. Lucille Anderson keeps a tight rein on little Michael, 2, as she pauses in her Christmas shopping on Dec. 20, 1947.
A suspension for punching a handcuffed arrestee, all caught on camera? Negotiable.
Discipline for making racially insensitive comments during a traffic stop? Tossed out and expunged from the record.
Punishments for making false statements, an offense for which the department says it has zero tolerance? Those, too, were wiped away as if they never happened.
The result: the weakening of a police accountability system that rarely finds fault with officers’ actions in the first place.