Chicago City Wire

Chicago GOP Chairman Chris Cleveland finds the message passed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s latest mask mandate to be painfully obvious.

“Masks are for the little people,” Cleveland said. “We see this again and again. We see Nancy Pelosi not wearing a mask. We see Lori Lightfoot in a mosh pit. We see Barack Obama partying on Martha’s Vineyard. Nobody’s got a mask.”

With the number of newly reported COVID-19 cases recently growing to top 400 a day, city officials renewed an indoor mask mandate that requires anyone over the age of 2 to wear a face mask in indoor public spaces, regardless of vaccine status. The action has left business owners across the city worried about how to get frustrated customers to comply with an infringement many they thought they had overcome.  

“Hopefully word gets out and we don’t have to be the people to educate everybody,” Mary Kay Tuzi, a second-generation co-owner of Twin Anchors Restaurant & Tavern in Old Town, told MSN.com. Still, Tuzi said a re-established mask mandate figures to be easier to pull off than requiring owners to check for proof of vaccination at the door.

“Having to check vaccine cards would have been a nightmare,” she said. “If this was the compromise they came up with, I’d rather do it.”

In either case, Cleveland said Lightfoot taking some of the actions she has recently doesn’t make the job any easier.

“Of course, there was that photo of the mayor at Lollapalooza a few weeks ago,” he said. “I suppose Delta had started to surge at that point.”

Tuzi’s co-owner brother, Paul, said he especially worries about potential pushback at the bar, where crowds have gotten back into the swing of milling around the same way they grew accustomed to in pre-pandemic times. He said he can even see how many of them now being vaccinated may actually work against maintaining order going forward, with many of those customers now convinced the masks are totally unnecessary.

“I can already anticipate we’ll have arguments like that,” he said.

At Lift Chicago Gym, owner Josh Siroko said he can only hope the mandate will be in place for a short time.

“People were really excited to take the masks off, so it’s going to be a change for everyone, everywhere,” he said. “It’s going to be weird.”

With the number of new COVID cases now surging across much of the city, Susan Gardner has tried to stay one step ahead, moving to implement her own mask mandate at her Salon Envy shop in Lincoln Park two weeks ago.

“With everything going on and the new variants, I just want to protect the staff and the guests,” said Gardner. “I don’t want anyone to have anything happen here.”

As the city’s infection rates have ticked up, so too has the level of criticism aimed at Lightfoot, with much of it coming from her decision to allow Lollapalooza to happen even as she was in the midst of enacting restrictions.

"At the same time she's threatening possible restrictions if cases rise above 200 per day, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is moving forward with plans to bring 100,000 a day to Grant Park for Lollapalooza," Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt said.