Jane Byrne, 81, Chicago's first woman mayor

CHICAGO - Jane Byrne, 81, who capitalized on Chicago's slow reaction to a snowstorm to score one of the biggest election upsets in the city's history and become its first and only woman mayor, died Friday.

Mayor Byrne, whose four-year term brought festivals and filmmakers to Chicago but was also filled with upheaval at City Hall, died at a hospice in Chicago.

She famously beat Mayor Michael Bilandic in 1979 after his administration failed to adequately clear streets fast enough after a blizzard. But during her term, she was branded with nicknames such as "Calamity Jane" as she speedily fired and hired people in such top jobs as police superintendent and press secretary.

"It was chaos," Mayor Byrne herself acknowledged in a 2004 Chicago Tribune story, attributing many of the problems to her wresting power from the old boy Democratic machine that had ruled the city for decades. "Like the spaghetti in a pressure cooker, it was all over the ceiling."

Mayor Byrne was also credited with changing the feel of the city. She started the popular Taste of Chicago festival and initiated open-air farmers' markets.

"The formula was basic: The more attractions, the more people, the more life for the city," she wrote in her 1994 book My Chicago. "I vowed to bring back the crowds, to make Chicago so lively that the people would return to the heart of the city and its abandoned parks."

It was Mayor Byrne who let John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd film The Blues Brothers in Chicago. She even granted Belushi's request to crash a car through a window at Daley Plaza, figuring loyalists of the late Richard J. Daley didn't like her anyway.

She also helped draw national attention to the infamous Cabrini-Green public housing complex when she and her husband moved into an apartment there after a gang war killed 11 residents in three months in 1981. They stayed for three weeks.

"The city of Chicago has lost a great trailblazer," said Mayor Rahm Emanuel. "From signing the first ordinance to get handguns off of our streets, to bringing more transparency to the city's budget, to creating the Taste of Chicago, Mayor Byrne leaves a large and lasting legacy."

In 1983, Mayor Byrne lost her reelection bid to State Sen. Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor.

Mayor Byrne's first husband, Marine Corps aviator William Byrne, died in a plane crash in 1959.

Mayor Byrne remarried in 1978. Her second husband, Jay McMullen, a former newspaper reporter who became her press secretary, died in 1992.