A Buzy Bee Board Up worker places a sheet of bulletproof glass over the glass door to an apartment building at 2210 S. Michigan Av., ahead of the NATO summit in Chicago. (Credit: CBS)
Reporting Derrick Blakley
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CHICAGO (CBS) – The NATO summit is almost here, and while Mayor Rahm Emanuel has insisted it will be business as usual for most of the city, at least one business is profiting from the heightened security in Chicago.
CBS 2’s Derrick Blakley reports Buzy Bee Board Up has never been busier.
Buzy Bee president Steven Trzaskowski said they’ve received a late rush of calls from businesses worried about possible damage during protests leading up to the NATO summit.
“A lot more of your restaurants, and things like that are calling us a little later on with the concerns,” he said.
The company’s business has spiked 20 to 30 percent, due to concerns about the NATO summit and protests planned for this week.
The apartment tower at 2210 S. Michigan Av. called Buzy Bee about a long stretch of ground floor glass windows on a building right in the protest zone.
The board-up met with approval from the building’s residents.
Tenant Bruce Walker said, “Wonderful, take care of it now, because we never know what’s going to happen.”
Fellow tenant Ruby Gray said, “A storm is about to hit, and you never know how bad it’s gonna be. So it’s always best to prepare.”
The glass entrance door to the building was covered, too, with a transparent sheet of bullet-proof plastic.
“They’ve got a tempered glass, which is a safety glass, in there right now. But any hammer, anything that you’d hit it with, it would crumble,” Trzaskoski said.
Commerical buildings have been taking steps, as well. The same bullet-proof covering was used to cover windows at Delaware State Bank on the Gold Coast.
In preparation for a protest scheduled outside Boeing headquarters on Monday, street-level windows Boeing headquarters have been covered with aluminum panels.
Anti-war demonstrators have scheduled a Monday protest rally outside Boeing, targeting the company as a maker of military aircraft and missiles.
Public security measures around downtown and near McCormick Place are more visible, too. The Secret Service has set up heavy-duty crowd barriers near the convention center.
And city workers have been checking, and re-checking, downtown surveillance cameras.
The city has been attending to even the smallest details, hoping to make the best impression possible on the NATO delegates.
City workers have been seen spraying weed killer on cracks in the sidewalks around downtown and the South Loop.
