No, he didn’t, as would be obvious from watching him for a minute. He’s a well-known character, often seen riding one of his horses through the South Side.
We got a lot of the looting here in the South Loop; I couldn’t go to bed because it took some white guys with full facemasks nearly 45 minutes to hammer their way into the ATM they’d dollied out of the 7-Eleven across the street into the park. Some other guys had an easier time with an ATM pulled from a different convenience store earlier in the night. Pretty much any place in Printers Row that might have a cash register or can of beer was broken into. It didn’t seem to be unfocused anger, though, because Jones High School’s blocklong expanse of plate glass was untouched, and so were other institutions, salons, real estate offices, and vacant shops.
While some of the looters and vandals undoubtedly were downtown earlier from the protest, by 11 pm it seemed to be an entirely different thing. Cars were driving in from outlying neighborhoods to loot and drive back out again, especially at The Roosevelt Collection, a U-shaped retail center on Roosevelt Road not easily reached by foot unless you’re deliberately headed there.
I woke early and went downstairs to see if my own highrise had gotten hit (we weren’t), and to investigate all the stuff a suspicious car had hurriedly discarded around midnight in a nearby parking lot. There was about $10 in cash, some mail, a north suburban village employee ID—and a bright pink toddler-size Barbie car. No idea if that had been looted somewhere, or if the car had been stolen with all that stuff in it.
By 7 am, my neighbors were already roaming the sidewalks with brooms and dustpans. By 10, the prodigious amounts of broken glass were all gone, at least from the sidewalks and streets. Stores needed a few hours’ cleanup and boardup, but nothing like a fire, flood, or tornado would require. The police cordoned off the central area—with the usual problems of downtown residents not being allowed to go home—and it’s been pretty quiet all day.
More of a problem was that there was no transit service in the central area (about 20 percent of the City of Chicago) all day long, and all transit in the entire six-county region was shut down this evening with only about an hour’s notice (much less if you don’t follow the agencies on Twitter). No idea how hospital workers and the like are making it to work tonight and all day tomorrow.