THE CAMPISI SQUEEZE

CITY life The good men do lives after them; unfortunately, so do the traffic problems they create. JOE CAMPISI’s sudden death in January left a large void in the local restaurant scene, but those who work, play, and live near the famed Egyptian Restaurant still must deal with one of the pizza king’s legacies: the Campisi Squeeze.

Regular drivers of Mockingbird Lane have long marveled that parking is allowed on Mockingbird between Greenville Avenue and McMillan, one block east of Central, where patrons risk their lives darting across the busy street to The Egyptian. The more skeptical wonder: is somebody in the upper echelons of city government eating a lot of pizza?

Some homeowners in the M Street neighborhoods to the south feel that the Campisi Squeeze encourages traffic to race through their residential area to avoid the bottleneck. At city Department of Transportation traffic workshops last summer, residents asked that the parking allowance be repealed. Each request was denied, as were appeals to City Council, City Plan Commission, and to the DOT itself.

Off the record, DOT employees say they want to end the logjam, but they say that once the subject reaches a certain administrative level-poof!-it disappears. On the record, they deny that Campisi ever had any influence over their decisions. “We feel there is sufficient capacity during non-peak hours to carry the traffic,” says SAM WILSON. DOT assistant director of traffic operations. “If we find a two- or three-cycle backup at one of the lights, we’ll reexamine it.”