Editorial

We, at the Chatham Avalon Park Community Council, feel it is high time for all community leaders to invite President Barack Obama to a dinner party with canopies set up in the parking lot behind Mayor Harold Washington's favorite restaurant, Izola's, at 79Th Street and Rhodes Avenue, with U.S. Senator Roland W. Burris as the official host (he is a long-time Chathamite), and have the dinner party the Mayor had in September, 1986, after he won the City Council battle, known familiarly as "Council Wars" and present economic development proposals for Chatham from federal stimulus funding to create jobs desperately needed, especially for the young people in the neighborhood, and to build a community center, a senior citizens center at the vacant lot at 82ND Street and King Drive, and a health and fitness club on the vacant lot that was the former site of Rhodes Theater at 79Th Street and Rhodes Avenue, like Bosse Sports in Boston, and to invite the upscale building of trendy shops and restaurants and tony places for people to dance and relax, like elegant supper clubs, to revitalize the area with a cash infusion of $5-7 billion dollars (you should know the nationwide white community received billions of dollars of federal largess under President Ronald Reagan to build absolutely beautiful neighborhoods all over the United States and a comfortable living in suburbia). So let's not waste time doing so.