It’s a half hour before game time at Wrigley Field, and a river of fans is streaming toward the stadium. There’s a carnival atmosphere on the street, a loud, happy stew of anticipation and solicitation. On the north side of Addison, between the Red Line station and Sheffield Avenue, a vocal cadre of sidewalk vendors is hawking T-shirts, pennants, peanuts, bottled water, and tickets by the fistful.
Mark Weinberg, one of Left Field Media’s attorneys and a veteran of a similar lawsuit that established his right to sell a book critical of Blackhawks management outside the United Center, says the context for this battle includes the park makeover, the related ceding of public sidewalks on Waveland and Sheffield to the Cubs, and a concern that the area will be sanitized and in effect Disneyfied. “There’s tension between First Amendment rights and our society’s love of gentrification,” Weinberg says. “And there’s a parallel in the fight over the Lucas Museum—a trend of selling off public space to private entities.”
Mason presided over the injunction hearings on behalf of U.S. District Court judge Jorge L. Alonso, who’ll make the deciding call. v
