The NBC5 blog, Ward Room, has an interesting post which puts some perspective behind the 2nd Ward's drastic change in the remap:
In 2007, Bob Fioretti achieved a Chicago first.By winning election as 2nd Ward alderman, he was the first white politician to take over a ward from a black politician. The 2nd Ward had a special place in African-American political history. The city’s first black alderman, Oscar DePriest, won the seat in 1915. But beginning in the 1990s, white condo owners began to displace blacks in the South Loop. The result was a white alderman. Fioretti ousted Madeleine Haithcock. A year later, he took over the committeeman’s post, when Rep. Bobby Rush stepped down.On Thursday, Fioretti got his reward for ousting a pair of black politicians: his ward was mapped out of existence. There will still be a 2nd Ward, obviously, but it won’t be in the South Loop. It won’t be the historic 2nd Ward of Oscar DePriest. Instead, the 2nd Ward has become the most abominable monster in the history of Chicago mapmaking. It looks like a digital character in the old video game Tempest. Beginning on the Gold Coast, it wanders west into Lincoln Park, then across the Kennedy Expressway into Wicker Park, uniting neighborhoods that have nothing in common but white voters.
