Marathon Pundit: IBD op-ed on endangered Chicago Reagan apartment

Latvia: An appropriate Lenin memorial

As Investors Business Daily pointed out in an op-ed a few days ago, communism murdered 100 million people. But while Vladimir Putin is reaffirming his nation's quasi-religious support of Vladimir Lenin, the University of Chicago is poised to tear down his the Chicago home of our 40th president.

A truly free Russia would cart Lenin's body to the nearest garbage dump. Yet in the Land of the Free, how are we honoring the man who could rightly be called the world's anti-Lenin, Ronald Reagan?

By now the president who won the Cold War and made it morning again in America should have been added onto the face of Mount Rushmore. Instead, as reported by the late president's associate, Peter Hannaford, in the American Spectator, the University of Chicago is poised to demolish Reagan's early childhood home in the city's Hyde Park neighborhood.

Hannaford notes that in 1915 the Reagans "rented a cold-water flat in a four-story apartment building at 832 East 57th Street" when the future president was about 4 years old. Reagan later reminisced "about the thrill of seeing horses pulling the fire wagon down the street at a gallop." And "while living in Chicago he also nearly died from a serious case of pneumonia."

It is beyond ironic that the University of Chicago, of all institutions, whose medical school owns the land, could contemplate replacing this landmark "with a grassy strip bordering what will be a new parking lot."

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