TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT GROWS IN CHICAGO, A PRECINCT AT A TIME

Drawing pistols and swinging axes to bust up illegal speak-easies, Eliot
Ness and other federal prohibition agents stalked Al Capone and the
gangster bootleggers on this town's wickedest streets in the booze wars of
the 1920s.

Since the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition and legalized the sale of
alcohol in 1933, Chicago has never been known as a place where thirst goes
unquenched. But a new temperance movement has taken hold in this
shot-and-a-beer city, a crusade to make some Chicago neighborhoods as sober
as Salt Lake City on Sunday morning.

In an effort to make city neighborhoods more wholesome and appealing to
families, Mayor Richard M. Daley has been promoting a "vote dry" campaign,
with City Hall lawyers teaching citizens groups how to outlaw the sale of
alcohol in a precinct, typically a few blocks of 400 to 500 people, or even
at a particular address.

"If you decide in your precinct to do this," Daley told cheering crowds at
Salem Baptist Church on the South Side recently, "you will have the full
support of my administration."

If 25 percent of the registered voters in a precinct sign a petition to
outlaw the sale of alcohol, the measure goes on the ballot in the next
general election. Nearly 50 precincts, or parts of precincts, have been
voted dry in the last decade, a number that could soar with the Daley
administration pushing the technique.

Some tavern and liquor store owners have expressed outrage about the
effort, saying they are being made scapegoats.

"This is ridiculous," said Jerry Rosen, the director of the Illinois Liquor
Store Association. "I understand Daley wants to make the city more livable,
so everybody doesn't run to the suburbs. But he's got this fascist
mentality. He doesn't like something -- that's it. Well, this is really
unfair." But in some neighborhoods crowded cheek by jowl with bars and
liquor stores, alcohol so dominates the landscape that little else seems
able to thrive. Along some parts of 79th Street on the city's South Side,
drunks urinate in public and crowds of foul-mouthed young men rule the
street corners. "These places are disrespecting the neighborhood," said the
Rev. Michael Pfleger, the pastor of St. Sabina's Roman Catholic Church on
the South Side, who is leading a petition drive to put some liquor stores
out of business. "Some of these places look like junk houses," Pfleger
said. "And they attract alcoholics, drug addicts."

The 48-year-old priest, who has long protested the preponderance of alcohol
billboards in poor, black neighborhoods, said the unsavory atmosphere
created by some liquor stores had caused many other shopkeepers to flee.
The Daley administration's anti-alcohol efforts are part of a series of
moves intended to make Chicago a better-behaved and more upstanding place
for families.

Thirty-eight of the city's 50 wards have a moratorium on the issuance of
new liquor licenses. The city has passed measures intended to keep out
"gentlemen's clubs," where women dance naked on tables and sometimes sit on
the laps of men.

To shame the patrons of prostitutes, City Hall distributes a list of men
who have been arrested by police, a list that is often published in
neighborhood newspapers.

Mr. Daley also announced recently that the city would demolish some "hot
pillow" motels on North Lincoln Avenue, places used mostly for illegal sex,
and build a police station, a park and a branch library there. Lamenting
that the neighborhood had become "a place for families to avoid," Mr. Daley
declared, "That reputation will change."

The mayor, who goes to Mass regularly at Old St. Patrick's Church and
refuses to do any business on Sunday because it is a day reserved for his
family, has little tolerance for untidy streets or unseemly behavior. A few
years ago he ordered that the St. Patrick's Day Parade be held on
Saturdays, so that families could attend, and he sent word to police that
public drunkenness and wild behavior would no longer be tolerated as part
of the Irish celebration.

Daley is not a teetotaler, and he has said most of the 6,000 establishments
in Chicago selling liquor conduct themselves honorably. But neighborhoods
that attract an unruly bar crowd, he said, have little chance of keeping
families. Judy Ollry, who lives in a neighborhood near Midway Airport, said
a bar near her home was making life miserable. "People were having sex in
the alleys," she said. "They were falling asleep in doorways."

She and her neighbors got a petition to put the issue on the ballot, and it
won handily. Neighbors did not want to vote the entire precinct dry, Mrs.
Ollry said, because it would have shuttered a popular, well-run Polish
dancing bar, the Baby Doll Polka Club. They only wanted to close a
trouble-making tavern called Off the Wall.

Since the tavern was forced to close, she said, the problems have declined
sharply. Mrs. Ollry, who has a young daughter, is married to a Chicago
firefighter, John Ollry, who is required to live within the city. She said
she had watched many people give up and move to the suburbs. "We're
invested in this neighborhood," said Mrs. Ollry, who recently upgraded her
kitchen. "We're not going to let some awful bar run us out."