To understand the stakes, one needed only to cast a sidelong glance at Detroit, where the spectacle of rioting and black power anger prevailed in the years after the 1967 riot, a situation from which the city never recovered. Thereafter, the name Detroit—previously known as the “arsenal of democracy” and the “Motor City”—evoked images of burning ghettos and middle-class whites taking target practice in the suburb of Dearborn, preparing for the race war to come. That the city was never able to counteract this spectacle explains a great deal about why Detroit failed to keep either its white middle class or the companies they worked for within its limits, and why it would never attract enough service firms to make it into a global city. Chicago, on the other hand, had as much ugly spectacle as Detroit to contend with, but it seemed able to repel the stigma of each seemingly disastrous episode with astonishing ease. Chicago made it through the late 1960s and 1970s with its sense of civic pride intact, even if its civic pride had become an exclusively white feeling. But even to maintain the civic pride of the white middle class was a feat during this period of urban decline and white flight, when the American dream lay beyond the noisy, polluted urban landscape in the leafy outlying suburbs, and Chicago’s ability to accomplish this owed a lot to its mayor. Every time the city seemed on the verge of falling apart, Chicagoans rallied around their mayor. And their mayor seemed to understand just what needed to be done to take his city into the global age.
Daley was ferociously proud of his city, and his pride was infectious, but the resilience of Chicago’s civic spirit was due to the fact that it was embedded within the city’s physical environment. Between 1960 and 1965, Chicago became the kind of city that middle-class whites could feel good about living and working in, and Daley played a key role in making this happen. In fact, he was merely following the blueprints of the 1958 “Development Plan for the Central Area of Chicago,” which had singled out for “special emphasis . . . the needs of the middle-income groups who wish to live in areas close to the heart of the City.”31 In the context of 1958, the phrase middle-income groups meant white people, and the “needs” being referred to were luxury housing and the kinds of leisure and retail resources that would keep these people happy. The idea being voiced by Loop business leaders, especially retailers and developers, was that the central business district was in danger of being overrun with black pedestrians and shoppers and desperately needed an infusion of white middle-class residents. Developer Arthur Rubloff, a major player in the transformation of Chicago’s Near North Side, captured this view perfectly when he famously remarked, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the Loop, it’s people’s conception of it. And the conception they have about it is one word—black. B-L-A-C-K. Black.”32
Rubloff, who, at the time of his death in 1986 possessed a wardrobe that included one hundred hand-tailored suits, forty cashmere coats, five hundred silk ties, one hundred pairs of shoes, and fifteen tuxedos, had been eyeing the area north of the Loop since 1947, when he had coined the term Magnificent Mile to capture his vision for a major upscale commercial strip to be built along North Michigan Avenue, from the Chicago River to the ritzy Gold Coast neighborhood. In 1960 Daley moved to make Rubloff’s dream into reality when he cleared the way for a massive redevelopment project to the southwest of the Gold Coast, using $10 million of federal grant money to acquire and bulldoze a sixteen-acre strip bounded by North Avenue and LaSalle, Clark, and Division Streets. Of course the city made a call for tenders on the project, but, predictably, the Rubloff Company landed the contract with its plan for a $40 million middle-class housing development, complete with town houses, high-rises, swimming pools, tennis courts, and playgrounds. The development would be named Carl Sandburg Village—after, ironically enough, the poet who had so brilliantly evoked the hopes and frustrations of the kind of working-class people the project would be displacing. The overwhelmingly white middle-class Sandburg Village made the area a lot less diverse, replacing a sizable community of Puerto Ricans and the small Japanese “Little Tokyo” neighborhood around Clark and Division, but that was precisely the point. The city now had its barrier protecting the Gold Coast from the Cabrini-Green housing project, and the Loop, along with its Magnificent Mile extension, had a vital infusion of white middle-class residents and shoppers. And this was only the beginning.
Around the time that bulldozers were making way for Sandburg Village, builders were breaking ground at the other end of the Magnificent Mile on Marina City—a $36 million residential complex consisting of twin corncob-shaped, sixty-five-story towers on the north bank of the Chicago River at State Street. Advertised as a “city within a city” with such built-in amenities as a marina, a gymnasium, a movie theater, a swimming pool, an ice rink, a bowling alley, restaurants and bars, a parfumerie, and a gourmet shop with “items gathered from all over the world,” Marina City was a monument to the slick, sophisticated urban lifestyle that Madison Avenue was concocting in the mid-1960s to sell everything from automobiles to hi-fi stereos.33 The idea was a smashing success. Marina City’s nine hundred apartments were fully rented before the building even opened in 1965, providing the Loop with another concentration of solid middle-class residents on its northern border and thousands of shoppers perched at the southern edge of the rapidly developing Magnificent Mile. And once again it was Daley who worked behind the scenes to close the deal. In fact, the whole thing was a classic machine boondoggle, with the city selling the riverfront property at a considerable discount off its market value to CHA board chairman Charles Swibel, who then procured financing from the Janitors International Union, whose president, William McFetridge, was a close friend of Daley.34
The same year Marina City was completed, work began on Lake Point Tower, another utopian “city within a city” development that would further guarantee that the Near North Side would be filled with well-to-do white professionals into the foreseeable future. Overlooking Navy Pier just north of the mouth of the Chicago River, this two-hundred-meter-high, black undulating glass tower was designed by two students of Mies van der Rohe who were inspired by his 1922 design for a glass-curtained skyscraper in Berlin. In addition to offering truly breathtaking views of both city and lake, residents there enjoyed their own two-and-a-half-acre park that included a playground, swimming pool, duck pond, and waterfalls.
FIGURE 15. Daley, the builder, ca. 1958. Richard J. Daley Collection, RJD_04_01_0040_0005_0122, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.
Carl Sandburg Village, Marina City, Lake Point Tower, and the swanky stores opening up on North Michigan Avenue represented the new corporate image of white-collar Chicago and the suave lifestyle of urban consumerism and indulgent leisure that came with it. Every day at 5:15 P.M. the bartender at the Marina City bar rang a bell signalling that customers could claim 5-cent refills. Chicago was quickly redefining itself as a city that knew how to swing—a public relations coup that owed a lot to Frank Sinatra’s popularization of the song “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is)” in 1964 and Hugh Hefner’s opening the first Playboy Club on Walton Street in the heart of the Gold Coast. During its first three months in 1961, Hefner’s club attracted 132,000 guests; by the end of the year, it had 106,000 members, each one possessing a metal key topped with Playboy’s trademark bunny head. An astonishing number of people were thus flashing bunny keys around the city, and, even if a good many were out-of-towners who frequented the club when in town on business, the implications were the same. Chicago was a corporate city on the make, and this had profound consequences for its public culture and for its politics.
MAP 6. Major Loop building projects, 1963–1977.
Symbolic of the broader cultural change under way was Playboy Magazine’s 1965 move into the thirty-seven-story art deco Palmolive Building, replacing, ironically, toothpaste- and soap-maker, Colgate-Palmolive-Peet. With its prominent location behind the famed Drake Hotel at Lake Shore Drive’s sharp Oak Street Beach bend, the prestigious 1929 building became a billboard for Playboy, whose
name was spelled out on its top floor with nine-foot-high illuminated letters. Playboy was on the rise—in 1972 an estimated one-quarter of all American college men bought the magazine every month—and its genesis in Chicago was critical to its mass appeal. It was further testament to the fact that the cultural essence of Chicago was not to be found in coffeehouses and folk clubs but rather in the bars and nightclubs on the Gold Coast’s Rush Street strip, where many of the top jazz and blues performers played and got paid. This explains why in 1969, the Weathermen, an SDS splinter group advocating violent tactics to shake the country out of its self-satisfied stupor, attacked nightclubs on Rush Street in the infamous “Days of Rage” riot; such radicals understood, if perhaps only subconsciously, that these nightclubs were somehow as emblematic of the capitalist order they were opposing as banks and military contractors.
Although Chicago earned its credentials in the 1960s as a city that could play, it would soon come to be known as “the city that works.” The description, first used in a 1971 Newsweek article lauding Mayor Daley’s ability to create an efficient infrastructure for business and everyday urban life when other cities were floundering, conveyed a double meaning: that Chicagoans worked hard and that their mayor made the city work efficiently for them. “But it is a demonstrable fact,” Newsweek reported, “that Chicago is that most wondrous of exceptions—a major American city that actually works.”35 The phrase began appearing in local newspapers by 1972, and then in the Washington Post and New York Times in 1974 and 1975. Chicago had defined its brand, so much so that by the time Mayor Daley died of a heart attack in office in 1976, the phrase was run at the top of his obituary in newspapers nationwide. Yet the nickname was not merely the result of some kind of brilliant public relations campaign. Chicago became “the city that works” by the early 1970s in part because while other cities were dealing with crumbling infrastructures and deficient services in the midst of a generalized fiscal crisis, it had already managed to upgrade—often with the use of other people’s money—its transportation and municipal infrastructures.
By the end of 1960, Mayor Daley had overseen the completion of the badly needed Northwest Expressway (renamed the John F. Kennedy Expressway in 1963) out to O’Hare International Airport, most of which had been paid for with federal highway funds, and by 1970 the Blue Line of the “L” was conveying commuters out to the airport on its median strip. In 1961, moreover, O’Hare got a $120 million makeover financed without a penny of taxpayer money; Daley had driven a hard bargain and forced the airlines themselves to put up a forty-year bond to pay for the project, which helped make O’Hare the busiest airport in the world. And many of those arriving in Chicago would be there to attend a convention at Chicago’s new McCormick Place convention center. Then, in 1964, work was completed on a spectacular modernist federal government complex at Jackson and Dearborn, designed by Mies van der Rohe in the International Style, consisting of the thirty-story Dirksen Federal Building, the forty-five-story Kluczynski Federal Building, and a United States Post Office station around a spacious plaza. Once again, Daley had marshalled considerable federal funding to get the work done.
The following year was the occasion for another ribbon-cutting ceremony, when the city opened its magnificent new Chicago Civic Center (renamed the Richard J. Daley Center in 1976) between Randolph and Washington, across from City Hall. Yet another International Style skyscraper with an expansive modernist plaza, the center, which would house the county court system along with office space for both the city and county governments, was constructed with a special steel that was designed to rust, giving the building its distinctive red and brown color. Two years later, in 1967, Pablo Picasso completed a fifteen-meter-high, 162-ton cubist sculpture, made of the same material as the building it fronted and paid for with grants from local charitable foundations, to adorn the Civic Center plaza. When asked to approve the choice of Picasso for the project, Mayor Daley allegedly replied, “If you gentlemen think he’s the greatest, that’s what we want for Chicago, and you go ahead.” The “Chicago Picasso” was the first of a series of high-profile works of art that would bring a sense of worldliness to downtown Chicago. This was important for a city trying to cast off its image as blue-collar and obtuse. In 1974 the Federal Plaza got its own artistic landmark—Alexander Calder’s 16-meter-high, red steel Flamingo.
The Loop thus morphed into a vision of modernity, efficiency, and prestige at the very moment when American corporations were seeking to project these same attributes, and thus feared getting trapped within decaying cities stigmatized by high crime rates and racial tensions. Hence, with companies looking to the inviting suburban environs of Cook and DuPage Counties, where the McDonald’s Corporation would move its Loop headquarters and open its Hamburger University training center in 1971, Daley was able to make a viable case that Chicago was a good place to do business. But even with elegant Miesian skyscrapers, internationally recognized artworks, state-of-the-art residential developments, a burgeoning shopping district, a first-rate airport, and a highway network that enabled Loop professionals to make the daily commute from the desirable towns to the west and north, the mayor was working against strong forces pulling towards greener suburban pastures. DuPage County’s labor force doubled during the 1970s, and its population grew by 34 percent as numerous research facilities and corporate headquarters joined McDonald’s, AT&T, and Amoco along Route 5. During this same period Cook County’s “golden corridor” of high-tech companies quickly formed to the northwest, with Motorola, Pfizer, Honeywell, Western Electric, and Northrup Defense Systems setting up operations along the Northwest Tollway by O’Hare. Similar suburban high-tech corridors were taking shape in many of the nation’s metropolitan areas, a phenomenon that sucked tax dollars out of inner cities at time when they were most in need.36 In Chicago, Mayor Daley approved an 18 percent increase in property taxes in 1971, but this was not nearly enough to offset the loss in tax revenues from the flight of residents and businesses. In 1970, property taxes funded 39 percent of the city’s budget; by the end of the decade this figure had dropped to 27 percent.37
Such circumstances required extraordinary measures, and Mayor Daley, “the builder,” as some referred to him, worked tirelessly behind the scenes to close deals, get tall buildings constructed, and keep major corporations within the city. In 1964, he expedited the sale of a piece of land owned by the city so that work could begin on the First National Bank Building (now called the Chase Tower), a sixty-story curved granite building that opened in 1969 on Madison Street, between Dearborn and Clark.38 In fact, 1969 was a banner year for the Loop, with the opening of eight new buildings that provided an additional 4.6 million square feet of office space. It was also the year that work began on the city’s next tallest building, the $100 million, eighty-three-story Standard Oil Building, the result of another successful campaign by the mayor. Daley had moved quickly to arrange the company’s purchase of vacant land just north of Grant Park after being informed by Standard Oil’s chairman, John Swearingen, that the company had outgrown its South Michigan Avenue headquarters and was looking to move elsewhere. Around this same time, Daley also heard that Sears, Roebuck and Co., the largest retailer in the world, was considering new headquarters in the suburbs, and again went to work on preventing this from happening. After a sit-down with Daley, Sears’s chairman, Gordon Metcalf, announced plans for constructing the world’s tallest skyscraper just west of the Loop. The only problem was that the parcel it wanted was bisected by a segment of Quincy Street. Faced with this dilemma, Daley ordered the city council to hastily authorize transferring ownership of the street to Sears for a very low price, and to make the deal even sweeter, he assured Metcalf that the city would cover the costs of relocating water and sewer lines for the new building. The offer was accepted: when the Sears Tower opened its doors in 1974, Chicago possessed a skyscraper that reached higher than the World Trade Center towers. Not only did this give Chicago a new symbol of prestige, but the $150 million it
took to build the tower would also irrigate the local economy, and thousands of white-collar jobs, along with a good many of the professionals who worked them, would remain within the city.
In Metcalf, Daley now had a powerful ally in his quest to fortify the Loop—a job that was seemingly never finished. Thus, as workers were still welding girders on to the Sears Tower, Metcalf was already spearheading—along with Donald M. Graham, CEO of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust, and Thomas G. Ayers, president of Commonwealth Edison Company—the ambitious Dearborn Park project to transform six hundred acres of blighted railroad yards in back of the old Dearborn Station on Polk Street into a mixed-income development that would house 120,000 people. The idea was part of the Chicago 21 Plan, which was drafted in 1973 by the quasi-public Chicago Central Area Committee, with the assistance of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Like the 1958 plan before it, Chicago 21 focused on the need to make the central business district attractive to middle- and upper-class residents through the development of upscale housing, playgrounds, parks, and high-quality retail resources. After all of the recent development on the North Side, the CCAC viewed this need as most pressing on the southern edge of the Loop, where the Sears Tower rose out of the ground like a hulking black sentinel.39
In the minds of the business leaders who had collaborated on Chicago 21, this was the soft underbelly of the Loop, exposed to the dagger of black poverty jutting up from the north end of the “State Street corridor.” Dearborn Park would provide the South Loop with the “protection” it needed, and Daley was of course on board with the plan, guaranteeing the city would bankroll the project’s eventual infrastructural requirements. So, in a striking example of the new face of unrestrained corporate power in Chicago, a group of downtown business executives formed the Chicago 21 Corporation and raised $14 million in investment capital to acquire land and build a massive “mixed-income” housing development on the Near South Side. There was no hiding the fact that Dearborn Park was intended to serve as a barrier between the poor blacks of the Near South Side and the suits and ties of the South Loop—the apartment buildings all faced inward, the parks would be fenced off and reserved for residents only, and all the streets running north-south within the development were cul-de-sacs.40 As for the “mixed-income” aspect of the project, the Chicago 21 Corporation planned on reserving one building for low-income, subsidized housing, but it would be for the elderly rather than for families.
Chicago on the Make Page 31