Tue, Oct 25, 2005 page20

• Chicago's South Side rises in a long and uncivil war

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  A line of taxicabs wound their way along 35th Street near the home of the Chicago White Sox this weekend. So many cabs, in fact, that they were causing an actual traffic jam.

  Taxicabs and traffic jams may not be quite as rare as World Series are in this city, but here, on Chicago's South Side, they are still surprising enough to draw note.

  "Down in this neighborhood, you see, this is all a little hard to believe," said Steve Hosty, as he sat on the stoop of his Bridgeport neighborhood bungalow and considered the images unfolding around him: the helicopters flying overhead, the "security perimeter" of police officers down the street and, yes, the possibility that one could just flag down a passing taxicab somewhere other than on this city's bustling North Side.

  "Down here, we don't have many restaurants or all of that," Hosty went on. "And we don't have cabs unless you call them up on the phone and tell them to come."

  Down on Chicago's South Side, the notion that the White Sox have fought their way into the World Series against the Houston Astros seems to mean something more than just an end to a 46-year wait to see a game played so late in the year here. To many here, it also marks a moment of notice, at long last, for the White Sox side of town -- the side that has often felt invisible, left behind and disrespected, both in baseball and in life.

  "We're basically thought of as the second-class citizens in this city," said Carly Perminas, a college student who grew up on the South Side. "People say we're the blue collars. It's a whole other world up on the North Side. And until now, all everyone talked about was them. Them and their Cubs."

  Actually, when it comes down purely to baseball history, the archrivals in this famously divided city share more than either side would care to linger on.

  The teams have been colleagues in collapse over the years. The last time the Sox went to a World Series was 1959, and they have not won since 1917. Across town, the Cubs made it to the series in 1945, and they won it most recently almost a century ago, in 1908.

  But as Perminas points out, this rivalry, like most, is about more than baseball. It is about perceptions of class and race and heritage on the two sides of Madison Street, the line that splits the city into North and South.

  "In truth, I'd say there's no difference between the people that root at either park," said Rob Levoy, a White Sox fan who has moved to the North Side. "But the perception is that the North Side owns the city and the South Side built it."

  "The hatred," he said, "is real."

  And so, South Siders have gone right on moaning that elites crowd into the ivied Wrigley Field caring more about getting tan, talking on cellphones and planning their post-game North Side bar-hopping than about baseball.

  North Siders, meanwhile, gripe that the fans at US Cellular Field (the White Sox park many here still call Comiskey) are too rough, too wild and inhabit a dismally ugly stadium, whatever its name, in a neighborhood with little to do.

  The battle runs deep across generations, carrying with it tales of loyalty demands recounted on both sides of town this weekend: the Sox fan who claimed that he would not attend his son's wedding if the bride was a Cubs fan; the Cubs fan who promised his family that he would buy Astros caps and T-shirts for all of them so they could root against the Sox in style.

  Still, until now, some South Siders say, they were so overlooked that their side of the rivalry was mostly ignored. Many people equated Chicago baseball with the Cubs. Their games sold out, while White Sox seats went empty. Out-of-town tourists flocked to the Cubs' home, Wrigley Field, just to get a look.

  But now, the Sox signs have spread north, beyond the homemade posters and the glued-on baseball cards in the windows of Bridgeport homes. Downtown, the lions that guard the doors of the Art Institute along Michigan Avenue wear Sox caps. Sox banners flutter from the bridges across the Chicago River.
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