Haymarket

So, looks like the Haymarket statue will be put in this week.

After 138 years, Haymarket memorial to be unveiled :

On Sept. 14, in a reversal of 118 years of civic amnesia, a memorial to the Haymarket Incident of 1886 is to be unveiled at the site of the carnage, Crane's Alley on the east side of Desplaines Street, north of Randolph.

Labor leaders such as Gannon will be there. They believe that the Haymarket Riot, a classic clash of the era between oppressed workers and brutal authority, marked the birth of a national movement for an eight-hour workday.

Representatives of the Chicago Police Department will be there. For almost a century, they argued that the only real story of the Haymarket was that seven cops were "martyred" by bomb-throwing radicals.

And historians and other scholars will be there, too. Many of them believe the Haymarket Incident was a police riot, pure and simple.

Even today, the powers that be in Chicago can't fully agree on just what went down that night or who was to blame, but they agree on this: It's crazy to ignore it.

"I think people really did want to put to rest the animosity that has grown up around the issue of the Haymarket Square," said Chicago labor lawyer Elena Marcheschi, a member of the committee that chose the memorial's design. "Everybody agreed there needed to be a memorial at that site -- and how embarrassing it's been that there wasn't."