You can't shovel City Hall

No I didn't.

Since I've been in Chicago, snow has always come in drips and drabs - an inch here, an inch there. Since yesterday, we've had about 7" in my neighborhood, which seems fairly unusual, although the city is doing a fairly good job keeping the major arteries clear. But the white stuff wasn't always cleared like clockwork in the City That Works. It took a freak blizzard in 1979 to show that City Hall screws this stuff up at their peril:

When 1979 dawned, there were 22 inches of fresh snow. For most people, it was just another wicked Chicago blizzard. For [mayoral candidate Jane] Byrne, it turned out to be an answered prayer.

The series of snowstorms that began that night is the first thing most people bring up when recalling Byrne's defeat of Daley's heir, Bilandic. A record total of 90 inches of snow, falling in just a few weeks, paralyzed the city. Trains and buses, those that could move, were hours late. Side streets were impassable for months. Fights broke out over parking spots, and the unplowed snow-mounds of filthy gray, frozen misery-turned voters from inconvenienced, to angry, to outraged.

Chicagoans could overlook many of the Democratic machine's sins as long as it delivered the basic services. Now that fragile pact was kaput.

Bilandic's failure to get the city moving again, streets cleared and garbage picked up was damaging enough to his re-election. But when CTA trains finally began running again, the decision to have them skip South and West Side stops and speed white suburbanites to their destinations spelled disaster for Bilandic in the African-American community.

This was no small thing. It gets mentioned in literature set in Chicago during that period, such as Adam Langer's Crossing California. This American Life mentioned the blizzard in an excellent episode on Byrne's successor, Harold Washington. It turns out that laissez-faire sanitation services will never be popular.