People who live in Chicago are well aware that the 2012 NATO Summit is taking place in their city. And everyone who works in the city’s downtown is painfully aware of this.
To prepare for the Chicago NATO Summit — which will on May 20 and 21 bring leaders, and protestors, from around the globe to Chicago — the city has closed roads and enacted restrictions on commuters. Those who ride Metra trains into the city, for instance, can’t bring backpacks, liquids or food on their trains.
People today are telling me that the city feels like a ghost town, at least compared to a normal Friday. Mostly it was on the trains that things felt off; normally packed commuter trains were half-full this morning.
Mark Menzies, group publisher of Real Estate Publishing Group, the parent company of Midwest Real Estate News, said that the city this morning barely felt like Chicago.
“Stores, hotels and office buildings are boarding up doors and windows,” Menzies said. “Willis Tower covered its marble foundation all the way around the building with plastic. They want to protect it from having paint thrown on it.”
The Chicago Boeing office building near the Oglivie train station is surrounded by 10-foot-tall fences. And if that wasn’t deterrent enough, armed guards, too, were visible protecting the building. You can see pedestrians jerking their heads to the sky nearly constantly; that’s because of the U.S. Army helicopters flying over the city. Yesteday, a group of protestors set up their own outdoor living room — couch, rug and chairs — outside of the Citibank building to protest the high number of housing foreclosures sweeping the country.
“It’s the calm before the storm,” Menzies said early this morning. “No one knows what will happen.”
