Certainly, broader structural forces were also driving the move towards a redevelopment approach that ended up privileging the interests of the downtown business elite over any goals of social justice, and Chicago’s land use profiteers were not much different from other big city developers throughout the country in their haste to take advantage of their privileged role in municipal governance. But one would be mistaken to overlook the enormous power that Daley wielded over Chicago’s urban renewal adventure. While developers and planners often hid behind technical language to draft plans that hinged on racial exclusion, the mayor exhibited a will to act boldly and ruthlessly to preserve the city’s segregated racial order. It was a will, one could argue, that developed out of Daley’s years of fighting with the Hamburgers on the front lines of a guerrilla war against racial invasion—a background that distinguished him from other big city mayors of the time. This did not mean that Daley did not choose his words carefully; he understood the civil rights awakening that was in motion, and he was very adept at leaving few public traces of his segregationist ways. And yet his actions spoke much louder than his words.
A prime example was his intervention into the plan to construct the new Dan Ryan Expressway, a badly needed highway that was to serve as a southern route out of the Loop. The Dan Ryan was one among several new highways radiating out of the Loop that the mayor was going to build—a project that created a massive public works boondoggle paid for with federal dollars provided by President Eisenhower’s Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956. Few commuters taking the Dan Ryan today think much about the two sharp turns they are forced to make after crossing the Chicago River, but they are a remnant of the race war of position that was being fought in Chicago in the 1950s. These turns were not part of the original plan for the expressway, but after Daley saw that the proposed route would cut his childhood neighborhood of Bridgeport nearly in half, he ordered the planners to shift the road so that it would run right along Wentworth Avenue—the traditional boundary between white and black Chicago on the South Side that Daley’s gang had defended with their fists. But protecting his beloved Bridgeport was only part of the story. Daley’s intervention into the Dan Ryan’s planning came less than a month after the city council had approved the Robert Taylor Homes, and, having just authorized the placement of several thousand black families along State Street, just three blocks east of Wentworth, the mayor was now moving to make sure those families and their black neighbors would keep to their side of the color line. With seven lanes in each direction, the Dan Ryan would form an impenetrable boundary. “It was the most formidable impediment short of an actual wall,” wrote journalists Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, “that the city could have built to separate the white South Side from the Black Belt.”36
Hence, if critics and even more neutral observers of urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s often sounded like war reporters, throwing around terms like demolition, no man’s land, razed neighborhoods, and displaced people, that was precisely because urban renewal was a form of warfare. Few people strolling by any of the vast areas cleared out by bulldozers could resist comparisons to the bombed-out European cities of the war years. Were similar events of this scale to take place today, references to “ethnic cleansing” would no doubt be rampant. The fact is that while urban renewal made victims and displaced persons out of immigrants and poor whites along with blacks, the front lines of this war were at the edges of the ghetto, and the fact that the ghetto lay so close to valued real estate called for extraordinary actions at times. In Chicago, the battle to hold the color line required brutal tactics, and Richard J. Daley proved to be the perfect battlefield commander, unflinching in the face of the injuries he was helping to inflict. But a battlefield commander is hardly the ideal person to handle the refugee crisis caused by his actions, which Daley, the builder of the city’s most notorious high-rise housing projects and the numerous new police stations that went with them, was. When the dust had cleared, the city had obliterated a number of vibrant neighborhoods and destroyed more housing units than it had created.
MAP 5. Downtown development and public housing in the 1950s.
STRUGGLING AGAINST THE BULLDOZERS
The massive urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s set Chicago on a whole new course. Deciding whether that course took the city towards a bright or dismal future depends on which Chicago you are talking about. The Chicago one sees when moving north on Michigan Avenue past Millennium Park and its Frank Gehry bandshell, across the river to the Magnificent Mile, swanky retail stores packed with eager shoppers as far as the eye can see, and then on to the ritzy brownstone-lined streets of the Gold Coast, Old Town, Lincoln Park, and Lakeview leads to one conclusion; an encounter with some of the grittier streets of the segregated West Side, where storefront churches and liquor stores are the most conspicuous signs of life in a landscape dominated by litter-strewn vacant lots and boarded-up buildings, leads to quite another. It is hard to imagine today that neighborhoods like North Lawndale and East Garfield Park, both of which lie just minutes west of the Loop, right off the Dwight D. Eisenhower Expressway, were thriving, middle-class districts when Mayor Daley began his first term in office. Yet that was when the fate of such neighborhoods was determined. In the late 1950s, Daley and his allies in the business community decided that these areas should lie on the other side of the barriers they were erecting to insulate the downtown business district from the rapidly expanding black ghetto. This decision was made, in fact, as these very same communities were in the process of becoming the blighted ghetto that everyone feared. In the 1950s, whites began to flee these areas as if they were escaping a flood or some other natural disaster, transforming the population from overwhelmingly white to predominantly black in the span of less than a decade. North Lawndale’s demographic transformation was the most dramatic of all, shifting from 87 percent white to 91 percent black between 1950 and 1960. What was a middle-class mix of Jews, Poles, and Czechs became a lower-income black ghetto seemingly overnight, a movement of people that was quickly followed by a migration of viable businesses and decent jobs out of the area. Studying the structural conditions behind the social distress of young blacks in this area in the 1980s, then University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson found, astonishingly, that while the area provided just one bank and one supermarket for a population of 66,000, it possessed no less than 99 bars and liquor stores and 48 lottery vendors.37
What was happening in North Lawndale resembled the situation in a number of areas south of the Loop as well, such as Woodlawn and Englewood, and the incredible rapidity with which such neighborhoods were transitioning from stable middle-class settings to depressed slums weighed heavily upon the minds of the business leaders and city officials who drafted Chicago’s 1958 development plan. It weighed even more heavily upon the spirits of residents of these areas, who looked into the eyes of the young around them and saw frustration and disillusionment staring back. After happening upon a group of teens shooting pool during school hours one day in her South Side neighborhood, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks reflected upon this precocious fatalism in her famed poem “We Real Cool,” a short stanza that reads like an autobiographical epitaph concluding with the brutally simple words “We die soon.”38
By 1960 African Americans constituted nearly a quarter of Chicago’s population, and the migration of southern blacks into the city was showing no signs of letting up. In the face of such circumstances, downtown boosters looked to use as many physical and social barriers they could muster to insulate the central business district from the encroaching ghetto. Physical barriers included expressways, new government buildings and housing developments, and, perhaps most importantly, a new campus for the University of Illinois; social barriers would be constituted out of the new middle-class and upscale residential communities that would develop around these new structures. The objective was not only to keep the ghetto out but also to keep the exploding population of suburban c
ommuters shopping and otherwise amusing themselves downtown. Race was never mentioned in the plan—the mayor himself ordered that it not be—but, in a city with such a negligible presence of upwardly mobile middle-class blacks, the idea of catering to the needs of middle-class residents, so often evoked in city planning discourse, was unambiguously segregationist.
This did not mean, though, that working-class whites escaped the bulldozers unscathed. If Chicago was aspiring to be the most segregated city in the United States, the goal, at least by the early 1960s, had hardly been achieved in several areas north, northwest, and west of the Loop, where black neighborhoods lay close to communities of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Italians, and Poles. About seventy thousand blacks, for example, lived in the relatively integrated Near West Side neighborhood area, particularly in and around the Jane Addams Homes, Robert Brooks Homes, and Grace Abbott Homes projects, just a few blocks below Little Italy’s main drag along Taylor Street. For the coalition of developers and downtown business interests behind Chicago’s 1958 plan, this high crime and delinquency district, so perilously close to the Loop’s lower western flank, was a force to be reckoned with. But in view of the relatively large scale required for the development of any kind of effective buffer between the gritty streets of the Near West Side and the suits and skyscrapers of the Loop, the solution to the problem would necessarily involve the destruction of the neighboring community, which consisted of a multiethnic mix of Italians, Greeks, Jews, Mexicans, blacks, and Puerto Ricans. To be sure, this neighborhood was hardly a model of ethnic pluralism—the Italians had long monopolized the area’s political machinery, street gangs divided along racial and ethnic lines, many bars and restaurants were off limits to certain groups, and discriminatory practices by realtors and landlords meant that blacks and Puerto Ricans almost never lived in the same buildings as whites of European descent. And yet, if this neighborhood lacked cohesion and if its housing stock was a bit dilapidated, it was far from being a stagnant slum with little hope for the future. Storefronts were generally occupied, local associations were relatively numerous, and the area possessed a vibrant street life, replete with lemon ice vendors, Italian beef and sausage joints, and pizza parlors. In short, this area hardly fit the profile of a slum to be cleared at any cost, and yet it would be cleared anyhow, if not without a fight, so that the downtown business crowd could have its wish—a new branch of the University of Illinois to buffer the Loop against the swelling ghetto to its west.
Such circumstances explain why it would be here, between 1959 and 1962, that a scrappy movement of citizens would become the first real thorn in the side of the growth juggernaut. Some vocal resistance to urban renewal had manifested itself a year earlier, when the Hyde Park chapter of the NAACP had raised objections to the University of Chicago’s plan to demolish more than 20 percent of the housing in an 855-acre stretch of land between 47th and 59th Street—a scheme that would have displaced thousands of black families, raised rents in the area, and effectively whitened the community (which is precisely what eventually happened). But the campaign had fizzled out when the Hyde Park chapter of the NAACP, under pressure from the Chicago NAACP’s pro-machine leadership, pulled out.
On the Near West Side, however, the battle against urban renewal would take a very different course, with thousands of residents, mostly women, demonstrating in the streets holding signs emblazoned with such slogans as “Daley Is a Dictator.”39 The mobilization of the Near West Side’s Harrison-Halsted Community Group in response to the city’s intention to acquire 155 acres for the construction of a new university represented one of the first in a wave of similar protests that questioned the legitimacy of urban renewal plans that advanced the cause of downtown commercial development at the expense of working-class residents.40 In the case of the site selection for Chicago’s new campus, the subordination of neighborhood interests to those of the downtown business elite was particularly blatant because an earlier plan to locate the campus in the East Garfield Park area had elicited enthusiastic support from both university trustees and community leaders, who viewed the university as a bulwark against the area’s transformation into a black ghetto. Here was an idea that seemed to fit a much more democratic conception of what should be at stake in urban renewal—democratic not only in the sense that it would have redistributed resources to the average residents of a neighborhood badly in need of help but also in its potential support for the cause of racial democracy. As the primary public university in the metropolitan Chicago area, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) was destined to attract a racially diverse student body and staff, which made it the perfect cure for a community in the throes of rapid racial transition. But in the end, the pleas of Garfield Park and the protests of the Near West Side fell on deaf ears. As the Harrison-Halsted organization was filing last-ditch appeals to the city’s plan, its leader, a housewife turned activist named Florence Scala, met with the mayor to ask that residents, many of them elderly, be allowed to remain in their homes until the appeals were ruled upon. Daley denied the request and began evictions the next day.
Yet if Mayor Daley ultimately brushed aside Scala’s Harrison-Halsted organization without much trouble, the mobilization of Near West Side mothers embodied a new spirit of activism and a new will to frontally take on the sources of power behind the policies that were reshaping the city. In some sense, these angry moms rallying to preserve their families and their neighborhoods looked much like the mothers who had joined the ranks of racist mobs in years past for—to their minds—very similar reasons. In the protests against racial integration at both the Airport Homes and the Trumbull Homes, observers had noted with some surprise the very active participation of women, often with small children in tow. On both these occasions, much like numerous other such incidents around this time, protestors expressed not only hatred for their dark-skinned potential neighbors but also a populist-inflected anger against a city government that seemed to be conspiring against their families, their communities, and their property values. In challenging the machine’s undemocratic manner of decision making, the Harrison-Halsted organization was also drawing upon another more progressive legacy of political activism that had taken root in Chicago with the pioneering efforts of community organizing virtuoso Saul Alinsky in the early 1940s.
The Harrison-Halsted organization was not the only grassroots organization challenging the Daley machine’s growth agenda in this moment. About eight miles south of the UIC site, just to the east of the Dan Ryan, citizens in the black working-class area of Woodlawn were also coming together to oppose an urban renewal plan that threatened to wipe away their neighborhood to make way for another of the city’s institutions of higher learning, the prestigious University of Chicago (UC). With the bulldozers plowing away in Hyde Park, the university’s leadership, guided by fervent urban renewal advocate Julian Levi, devised another big urban renewal play that would further stabilize its environs by displacing lower-income black people. Initially constructed to hold the world’s first Ferris wheel, a replica “street in Cairo,” and a number of other carnival attractions for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a one-block-wide grassy strip known as the Midway (originally called the Midway Plaisance) had been buffering the university from the ghetto streets of Woodlawn since the 1940s. But by the late 1950s complaints of muggings around the Midway were proliferating. Seeking to push the ghetto further from its pristine Gothic walls and manicured lawns, the university announced a new plan to convert a mile-long strip just south of the Midway into a new South Campus for the university. Thousands of black families would be evicted from their homes and, as usual, nobody was saying much about where they would end up, but the mayor could not have been more on board with the plan. Daley was convinced by Levi’s argument that this was “the moment of truth” for the neighborhood—“the moment when assets and liabilities have to be cast up, when what is wrong and what is right has to be defined.”41 Due to Levi’s lobbying efforts in Washington, moreover, Congre
ss had passed new legislation in 1959 that gave the city enormous financial incentives for supporting such projects; if all went as planned, the university’s spending on the South Campus project would generate an estimated $21 million in federal urban renewal credits that could be used anywhere within the city limits. In other words, the whole affair was looking a lot like a fait accompli.
The idea of organizing residents in Woodlawn to take on the University of Chicago and City Hall over this plan thus represented a David-versus-Goliath scenario. If no time was a good time to take on the Daley machine, now was worse than ever. By the start of 1961, the mayor seemed invincible. Not only had he won reelection two years earlier with a near-record 71 percent of the vote, but he had also played a critical role in winning the presidency for John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first Catholic president, in 1960. In the tightest presidential election of the twentieth century Kennedy had carried the key swing state of Illinois by a mere 8,858 votes out of the 4,657,394 cast, but, with Daley getting out the vote in the machine’s strongholds, he had amassed a 456,312-vote margin in Chicago. Allegations of improprieties and lawsuits followed, but such suspicions only boosted Daley’s new political capital with the president—Daley was a kingmaker, and Kennedy would surely be taking his phone calls.
Chicago on the Make Page 21