A new mayor tried to shake things up, a new generation of asylum-seeking residents struggled to settle down — and new signs of climate change stormed all around.
A war in Gaza wrought immeasurable pain. A landmark law fundamentally altered our criminal justice system. A NASCAR race split ears downtown and split opinions citywide.
And we all still want to get to the bottom of that shooting at the White Sox game.
Chicago kept reporters busy in 2023. Here are our picks for the city’s top news stories of the year.
Migrant crisis
More than 26,000 of Chicago’s newest residents, fresh off harrowing journeys in pursuit of asylum, faced a whole new set of challenges in a city scarcely equipped to provide them shelter and other basic resources.
The influx of mostly Venezuelan migrants — shipped here from the southern U.S. border by Republican leaders aiming to put Democratic-led cities on the spot in the immigration debate — found themselves on the floors of police stations and airports as the city spent millions scrambling to stand up temporary shelters.
The crisis has highlighted historic tensions in Chicago’s Black and Latino communities, as officials grapple with how to provide for a never-ending stream of new arrivals while also addressing decades of disinvestment in South and West Side neighborhoods of color.
By year’s end, the sheer volume of arriving busloads — and planeloads — had declined somewhat as the Biden administration reinstituted a policy deporting many Venezuelans at the border. But officials expected the waves of Chicago-bound asylum-seekers to ramp up ahead of next August, when the city hosts the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Brandon Johnson elected
City Hall’s fifth floor took its sharpest-ever turn to the left as residents rejected former Mayor Lori Lightfoot and handily voted in former Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson over his conservative-leaning runoff election opponent, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas.
Johnson quickly racked up a string of progressive victories with ordinances to phase out the subminimum wage for tipped workers, guarantee 10 days of paid leave for all workers, and pose a ballot referendum question that could lead to a tax on high-end real estate transactions to fight homelessness.
But his administration also notched unforced errors in its first six-plus months that saw Johnson’s City Council floor leader, Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th), ousted from his leadership posts for trying to block a colleague from the chamber floor in order to end a chaotic council meeting.
Johnson’s office also mounted an effort to transform a toxic former zinc smelting site into a migrant shelter, a plan that was rejected by state officials and that highlighted the fraught relationship between the freshman mayor and Gov. J.B. Pritzker heading into 2024.
Blockbuster corruption trials
In a city where public corruption has run deep over the years, 2023 stood out for the size of the fish yanked from the sea by federal prosecutors.
Ex-Ald. Ed Burke (14th) — a prolific seeker of “tuna,” as a wired-up conversation revealed him referring to a developer he shook down for legal business — became the biggest trophy yet on the feds’ wall when a jury convicted Burke of 13 counts of racketeering, bribery and attempted extortion.
The takedown of the City Council’s longest-serving member followed the trial of two former ComEd executives and two former consultants, who were convicted of a nearly decadelong conspiracy to bribe ex-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan to benefit the utility. Madigan also saw his former chief of staff go down for perjury.
It all set the stage for another big year at the Dirksen federal courthouse in 2024, when Madigan himself — the only political fish bigger than Burke — is scheduled for trial on racketeering charges.
Sox Park shooting
Watch the surveillance footage a hundred times, and you still won’t be able to spot any flash, let alone a smoking gun.
Countless armchair Chicago sleuths have tried to crack the case in the months since two women were shot in the left-field bleachers in the middle of a White Sox game at Guaranteed Rate Field. Detectives have, too, and they’ve still come up empty-handed.
One of the women said she heard “a loud pop,” and then felt an impact on her leg, but didn’t notice anything until someone in the crowd saw blood on the ground. As for speculation about whether she’d sneaked a weapon into the stadium herself — “absolutely not,” the suburbanite said, on condition of anonymity.
Then-interim Chicago Police Supt. Fred Waller said investigators likely won’t ever know if the bullets came from inside or outside the stadium, and blamed himself for allowing the game to continue with nearly 22,000 people in attendance near an active crime scene.
Israel-Hamas war touches Chicago
As war raged in the Middle East, thousands across the Chicago area protested, prayed and feared for their loved ones caught in the crossfire.
An Evanston mother and her teenage daughter found themselves in the middle of the international crisis when they were taken hostage by Hamas while visiting Israel. They were released after two weeks, but another family with Chicago ties is still praying for the release of their 23-year-old son.
Ignorance and bigotry bubbled to the surface in other corners, as in Plainfield, where 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume was fatally stabbed 26 times by a conservative talk radio listener accused of targeting the boy and his mother because they are Muslims.
The pain has been felt across Cook County’s massive Palestinian community, which has had to protect children from threats while mourning the ever-mounting toll of relatives killed in Gaza.
Landmark laws take effect
After a series of court challenges, historic state legislation took effect, ending cash bail and banning assault weapons — seemingly free of the doomsday scenarios portended by opponents of the measures.
In the first few months of the revamped criminal justice system, which allows judges to jail defendants ahead of trial only if they pose a public safety or flight risk, observers noted a slower but more thoughtful process for deciding who should stay locked up.
The Cook County Jail’s population declined in the month after cash bail was eliminated, but experts say it’ll take a lot longer to fully evaluate the policy’s effects.
And while assault weapons sales spiked in Illinois while courts temporarily blocked the assault weapons ban prompted by last year’s mass shooting in Highland Park, a federal appellate court upheld the law — and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene.
Guns aren’t being taken away, though. People who owned such high-powered rifles before the ban took effect have to register them with the Illinois State Police.
Red flags of climate change
A mild winter gave way to a wet spring and summer that also saw wildfire smoke from thousands of miles away choke out activity across the city.
It was almost a cruel throwback to 2020 when experts advised people to stay inside or else mask up for several days as thick gray clouds of smoke wafted down from Canada and blanketed the skyline, ruining the local air quality.
Experts said those extreme wildfires were a direct result of a warming global climate, which Chicago was reminded of yet again within days of the smoke-out, as heavy rains flooded massive segments of the metro area, causing millions of dollars in damage.
Robberies on the rise
As a rash of carjackings that started early in the COVID-19 pandemic escalated, Chicago saw its biggest spike in robberies in 22 years.
And while shootings have dipped from historic highs in recent years, Mayor Johnson’s new Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling took the helm of the department with a lengthy to-do list as robbery crews canvassed the city night by night.
Snelling has deployed robbery “strike forces” to combat the scourge, while a new strategy laid out by Johnson expands resources in four of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods.
NASCAR rumbles downtown
After months of grumbling from downtown residents and City Council opponents and weeks of road closures to build the Grant Park street course, NASCAR racers fired up their engines — only to soon see rain wash out most of the lower-card race.
The main event proved water-logged as well, with prodigious rains drenching the city, wiping out an accompanying concert series and generally making life challenging for the thousands of fans who shelled out serious cash to attend.
But a break in the clouds and a scenic Chicago sunset made for great TV as Shane Van Gisbergen cruised to victory in the shortened race.
Love it or hate it, NASCAR returns to the lakefront next July — with briefer road closures.
Tragedy in the ranks
A brutal year for Chicago first responders ended with one police officer killed while chasing an armed suspect, another slain in a robbery and four firefighters killed in the line of duty — the fire department’s worst toll in 25 years.
Officer Andres Vasquez-Lasso, 32, was fatally shot in front of children playing at a Gage Park school. Aréanah Preston, 24, was returning home home when a robbery crew surrounded her in Avalon Park.
CFD Lt. Jan Tchoryk died of a heart attack while battling a blaze in a Gold Coast high-rise April 5 — one day after firefighter Jermaine Pelt died of smoke inhalation in a South Side fire.
Lt. Kevin Ward died in August from injuries he suffered after being trapped in the basement of a burning home near O’Hare Airport. And firefighter Andrew “Drew” Price fell through the roof of a four-story North Side building while battling an extra-alarm blaze in November.
“It hurts to the bone,” CFD spokesman Larry Langford said.
Other major stories
- Chicago beat out Atlanta and New York City as President Joe Biden’s pick to host the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
- A host of former Northwestern University football players came forward with disturbing details of locker room hazing, leading to the ouster of longtime head coach Pat Fitzgerald.
- A casino sought for years by multiple Chicago mayors opened to gamblers in River North — but its early returns for the city’s police and firefighter pension funds proved underwhelming.
- A Yellow Line CTA train slammed into a snow removal machine on the tracks, sending 19 people to hospitals and raising questions about the transit agency’s operations.
- A massive construction project on the inbound Kennedy Expressway caused innumerable traffic headaches for commuters.
- The unexpected deaths of Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz, businessman James Crown and Civic Federation President Laurence Msall left voids in Chicago’s business and philanthropic communities.
- Hundreds of public employees statewide were revealed to have bilked a federal COVID-19 relief program intended to help businesses stay afloat and keep people employed early in the pandemic.
- Thousands of lower-income residents across Chicago and Cook County received $500 monthly checks as part of a guaranteed income pilot program that some participants said provided much-needed relief but wasn’t enough to help them get ahead.
- The Friday Morning Swim Club’s season was sunk early due to permit issues and safety concerns about crowds that swelled to the thousands, taking the weekly plunge into Lake Michigan near Montrose Harbor.
- Numerous libraries across northern Illinois were evacuated over the summer due to a series of bogus bomb threats that led to charges against a Skokie man in at least some cases.
- More than 1,000 birds died on a single night at the peak of fall migration when they crashed into windows at the McCormick Place Lakeside Center, prompting officials to turn its lights off at night — highlighting the dangers many buildings pose to declining bird populations.
- And a 35-pound (or more) snapping turtle affectionately dubbed “Chonkosaurus” captured the hearts of Chicagoans, thanks to a viral video of the hefty reptile sunbathing near Goose Island.
