Last August, in the wake of the racist violence in Charlottesville, downtown aldermen Sophia King (Second) and Brendan Reilly (42nd) called for renaming Balbo Drive. The street honors Italo Balbo, a leader of the Blackshirts, the paramilitary wing of Italy’s National Fascist Party, who later became Mussolini’s air commander and governor of colonized Libya. The aldermen blasted Balbo as a brutal racist.
King and Reilly’s offices didn’t immediately respond to my interview requests this afternoon, but King told the Sun-Times that a major concern was the expense and hassle posed to business owners and residents who would have to change their addresses. However, there appear to be only three properties on Balbo whose addresses would have been affected by the name: DePaul’s Merle Reskin Theatre at 64-66 E. Balbo, the university’s new 30 East upscale student apartments, and the Carter House Apartments at 1 E. Balbo, the building that houses the South Loop Club. Reilly previously said DePaul was in favor of the Balbo name change.
“Balbo was a fascist thug and a mass murderer as governor of Libya,” Muir added. “We have a street named after him because he came here in 1933 as part of the fascist propaganda effort.” The professor argued that Balbo was complicit in ethnic-cleansing efforts in North Africa, including concentration camps established for Berber rebels where thousands of people starved to death.
