At least one person, and quite possibly two, are living in tents along the Lake Michigan shoreline of Chicago's northern Rogers Park neighborhood. The life guards don't care. And two 24th district cops lied to The Bench about one of them.As reported on June 24 by The Bench, a man has set up a tent at water's edge on the south end of Loyola Park, in the fenced off space reserved for wildlife.
Today, The Bench spoke with the Loyola Park beach dweller. He calls himself "Rainbow" and describes himself has a staunch liberal. He told me about his experiences as a prisoner around the country.
"Let me tell you," Rainbow said, "county jails are worse than regular prisons. You only get an hour a week for excercise in the county jails. It sucks."
But Rainbow learned valuable skills in those lockups. He showed me, for example, how to make a marijuana pipe out of the foil wrapping on a colored artist's pencil.Rainbow keeps a "memorial" in the sand, in which a candle is kept lit to memorialize "everyone who dies everyday."
He says he eats well. "You should see the eight or nine dumpsters behind Devon Market," he told me. "Yesterday I got ham hocks right out of one. Still good. I bought a can of beans there and cooked it all up here, on the beach."
Do the lifeguards mind him being there? "They don't mind," he said, "I earn my keep by cleaning the beach." Litter all around his camp site, Rainbow said this with a straight face.
Meanwhile, up on Jarvis Beach, a police dispatch went out just as I was finishing my interview with Rainbow. Somebody living up there called 911 to report that somebody was living in a tent there. So I race up, camera ready.
I arrived at Jarvis Beach just as CPD squad car 2422 pulled to the end of the street. I snapped some photos of a tent, not exactly on the beach but on the grass of the small park. I asked the cops if they were there for the guy living in the tent."Why do you want to know?" one officer asked.
"There was a 911 call about it," I said.
"It's not illegal to pitch a tent," one cop said. He covered his name plate.
"Then why are you here?" I said. "Why was a car dispatched here, for a tent?"
It was so sadly typical. Two jerk cops who wish they were James Bond, protecting national security secrets, acting like bigshots. I won't bore you with details. In short, the two cops left without telling me anything, without getting out of their car, without inspecting the tent.So the cops don't care enough to get out of their car and inspect a tent at Jarvis Beach that they were dispatched to look at, and the lifeguards don't care about a squatter littering and smoking dope with a huge spread in the wildlife space on Loyola Park beach.
Nice.
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