People sensitive about the city's Prohibition-era past now have another tourist attraction to make them cringe: Capone's Chicago.
The show, which opened Friday, re-enacts highlights of Al Capone's life and times with Disney World-style animated robot-figures.Gangster Capone, shown reclining behind his desk, brags of his control of the city as smoke rises from his cigar. Temperance advocate Carry Nation is depicted screaming and waving a hatchet in a demolished barroom.
"It's an ugly stain on the face of Chicago," said Dominic DiFrisco, president of the Joint Civic Commission of Italian-Americans.
He said Capone's Chicago and places like it are sleazy and help feed stereotypes that Italian-Americans are violent criminals.
Only recently has Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan supplanted Capone as the man most associated with Chicago by foreigners, DiFrisco said. He prefers Jordan's more positive image.
City officials also are troubled by echoes of Tommy guns.
"We do not use the gangster image to promote Chicago," said Dorothy Coyle, spokeswoman for the Chicago Office of Tourism. "We feel that Chicago is a world-class city, and people come here to see our architecture, to see our museums, to attend our festivals."
Capone's Chicago developers had hoped to display a collection of Capone memorabilia, but said they were warned against that early on.
Patricia McHugh, the attraction's president, said zoning officials indicated such displays would mean the business site would have to be rezoned as a museum.
"They were going to give us a very hard time" if the new zoning classification had been sought, she said.
Manager Michael Graham, who amassed the collection, hopes the city will warm up to the idea after officials see what the developers have done so far.
Capone's Chicago's animated displays are bloodless and heavy on historical points. The flash of guns is as violent as they get.
"We really want to be the place for American and Chicago history in this period," Graham said.