Lucky me; I work at, basically, Ground Zero. Some local orgs are making contingency plans; one local university has even moved up spring semester finals and pushed back the start of their summer session and is telling employees to make arrangements to work from home or their other campus if possible, and the Chicago Symphony has cancelled concerts for that week.
So how bad do you think it could get in the Loop? And how fouled up is public transportation likely to get? There is probably a fair amount of stuff I can do from home, but I have no idea how receptive management will be, and there’s also a fair bit of stuff that it would be totally impractical to do from home. (I’m not going to meet with clients at home, for example, and pretty much everything I send out needs to be reviewed and signed by an attorney first.)
My guess is: pretty damn crazy. The G-8 summit in particular seems to unfailingly attract crowds of angry protestors. They could hold it on the International Space Station, and these people would somehow show up to protest.
Oh great. One of the attorneys I work with is married to a management person at the local university I mentioned, and he says the Chicago PD isn’t going to announce details about the security perimeter until 2 - 3 weeks before - even to large institutions that will be directly affected. Which hey, I understand why, but it’s going to be pretty difficult to plan for normal business operations…
I left town during the one in Toronto. I was in Bancroft, several hundred kilometres away. I saw an unusual police presence there… It was on one of the most direct routes between the national capital and the northern G8 venue in Huntsville.
Ye gads! They are holding this in a major city? Don’t they usually do this somewhere easier to secure… like Siberia or something?
This is going to be a mess.
But were you personally affected by it. I was working at CBOT then, and don’t recall any real impact to me. Perhaps you did.
Obviously, this is a different question from “How crazy will it get?”, but usually I take that to mean. Is the Blue Line going to stop running. Will I not be able to leave the office because of civil unrest on the streets. Etc. etc.
A friend of mine was falsely arrested and should be part of the settlement class, and I know many, many people who were impacted - many friends, and my mother, were trapped by the police at that demo. I would have been there myself if I hadn’t had another commitment that night. I was working a couple of blocks from you then. And I expect this will be different because protesters are likely to target major financial institutions, not just to use Federal Plaza as a gathering place.
I now work across the street from a major financial institution which is likely to be targeted. I’m not looking forward to it.
I’m glad that I’m no longer working downtown, for certain. I’d be rather surprised if things go all higgledy-piggledy in Orland Park due to the meetings and protests.
Is this likely to fuck with traffic in the suburbs? I haven’t heard a thing about it yet (so thanks for posting this). But if it’s going to fuck with me getting to work on-time, that’s gonna be a problem.
I’d be very surprised if it affected us in the west suburbs. Even huge events like the Blackhawks victory parade a couple of years ago weren’t noticeable at all out here. There were over a hundred thousand people at that. Same with the Obama victory rally in November 08.
Although it feels like the trial I’m on is going to last forever, y’all are making me glad I should be clear of Chicago before then. I’ve been working in the IBM building for the last month, and I’m just looking out the window right now trying to imagine the chaos.
Could someone be so kind as to help a flatland tourister out in the matter of conference/summit dates? It’s not so much that I can’t find them — although a surprising number of articles are silent on the subject — as that there seems to be a lack of agreement. For example, something claiming to be the Official G8-NATO Summit Website states that altogether the summits will be meeting on the 19th through the 21st, with the G8 on the 19th and 20th and NATO on the 20th and 21st; but others, including protest sites, claim that activities run from the 15th through the 22nd. Does anyone have a link to reliable information?
Also, is the Gold Coast (specifically, the area around Division & Dearborn) far enough from the epicenter to escape major fallout? According to my reading of the map, that should be the case; however, I’d appreciate any any local insights.
