Chicago on the Make

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Chicago on the Make Page 43

by Andrew J. Diamond


  While the old Polish Triangle still retained some historical resonance, especially as it was home to the Polish Museum of America and Library, this new neighborhood, known within the Polish community as Jackowo, became the functional port of entry for Polish immigrants. Poles made up more than half of the population in the immediate area around the predominantly Polish St. Hyacinth Church, with the vast majority being foreign-born. Jackowo thus revealed a close-knit community cultivated out of shared needs for Polish-language church services, fresh pirogis, Polish ales, easy access to the latest literature out of Poland, and the kind of cutting-edge Polish rock music featured at the neighborhood’s hippest nightclub, Café Lura. But once again, while the concentration of Polish businesses on the strip of Milwaukee between Central Park and Belmont gave the area a Polish feel, Jackowo nonetheless coexisted, at times uneasily, with communities of working-class Mexicans and middle-class white professionals taking advantage of Avondale’s more moderately priced real estate market. With Polish immigration tapering off and Mexican immigration continuing apace, Jackowo was beginning to lose some of its Polish residents. This was due not only to rising rents associated with gentrification. Sociologist Mary Patrice Erdmans determined after interviewing numerous residents here that Poles seeking to move to the suburbs were also trying to put some distance between themselves and their Mexican neighbors.124

  Thus, working-class immigrants and ethnic entrepreneurs continued to carve out their own ethnoracial niches in the City of Neighborhoods. Unlike the politically powerful Pilsen and Humboldt Park neighborhoods or the Disneyfied old ethnic neighborhoods such as Little Italy and Greektown, however, City Hall proved reluctant to fully embrace these more recent ethnic enclaves. Chinatown managed to become one of the city’s premier tourist destinations, but it took a fund drive led by George Cheung and the Chinese-American Civic Council to raise the $70,000 to construct the Chinatown Gate in 1975. This is why the gate’s founders decided to inscribe it with the phrase (in Chinese characters) “The world belongs to the commonwealth,” an adage, which, according to the Chicago Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, “reflect[ed] the drive, determination and spirit of the Chinese people.”125 Likewise, Seoul Drive got its name only because Korean realtor Paul Park took the initiative to rally members of the Lawrence Avenue Korean Business Association to pressure their local alderman, Richard Mell, to propose the designation before the city council. As for West Devon, the Daley administration never embraced the district’s historic or cultural significance, a situation that many local businessmen believed was largely to blame for the area’s economic distress. Nor was Daley’s City Hall very interested in promoting Jackowo or either of the city’s rather small Arab and Assyrian districts.

  Why City Hall was reluctant to place its official seal on these neighborhoods can be glimpsed in the bitter controversy that erupted over the Seoul Drive ordinance. Much to the surprise of Alderman Mell, who believed the whole affair to be a political no-brainer that would end in garnering him support from Korean merchants, non-Korean residents of Albany Park objected strongly to their neighborhood being identified as Korean. “They’re singling out one group to identify a very diverse community,” asserted the leader of an organization calling itself Citizens for a Democratic and Diverse Albany Park. “We’re establishing chunks of territory by race. What’s next: Bosnia?” The Korean merchants responded by referring to how much they had helped to raise the area’s tax revenues and evoking visions of Korea Town becoming a tourist destination on par with Chinatown, which did little to appease opponents.126

  This story explains a great deal about why City Hall never figured out an effective way to brand in any coherent way the West Devon commercial strip, where a 1.7 mile section of the avenue was segmented into four honorary streets: Sheikh Mujib Way, after the founder of Bangladesh; Mohammed Ali Jinnah Way, after the founder of Pakistan; Gandhi Marg (Way); and Golda Meier Boulevard. When Debra Silverstein finally managed to unseat longtime Fiftieth Ward Alderman Bernard Stone she spoke of “Indians, Pakistanis, Jews, Muslims all working together on the street,” but this cooperation was perhaps made possible by the area’s ambiguous identity. Around the Argyle Street district as well the naming issue aroused indignation, with some referring to the neighborhood as Little Vietnam and others calling it New Chinatown, a situation most civic leaders in the area resolved by employing the more neutral Argyle. And yet these same leaders complained that their neighborhood was ignored by the city, a sentiment even more commonly heard around West Devon. While Chicago’s shifting, heterogeneous, “unmade” neighborhoods provided opportunities for multiethnic political cooperation, more vibrant local political cultures, and the kind of diversity idealized by realtors and urbanists alike, they remained largely excluded from the global-city agenda and were thus low priorities in the annual budget. Resources and power in Richard M. Daley’s Chicago flowed to the traditional ethnic strongholds that had been able to make marketable ethnoracial order out of diversity and to inscribe that order into the landscape. To fully understand this, one need only consider the counterexample par excellence: Chicago’s Filipino community. While Filipinos constituted the city’s second largest Asian population, just behind South Asian Indians, their spatial dispersal throughout the city made them political and culturally invisible.

  However, in considering how “the people” continued to make the city, it would be erroneous to limit the discussion to the impact of immigrants. In fact, by 2010 Chicago’s foreign-born population of just over 21 percent paled in comparison to those of global cities like Los Angeles (39.4 percent), New York (36.4 percent), San Francisco (35 percent), and Boston (26.9 percent). But the city made up for this deficit by attracting high numbers of American migrants from outside the Chicago metropolitan area.127 The 1990s was the city’s first decade of population increase since the 1940s, and by the early years of the twenty-first century, Chicago had emerged as a leading destination for those seeking an urban home in the United States; in 2001, for example, only Los Angeles had more people move within its jurisdiction. The strong inflow of middle-class professionals seeking Chicago’s brand of urban lifestyle helped drive the gentrification of the Near West and Near South Loop areas and to push up property values throughout the predominantly middle-class North Side, many parts of which experienced a more mild form of gentrification. The Lakeview area, for example, was a largely white middle-class community in 1990, but it was nonetheless textured by the hardly insignificant presence of Latinos (14.2 percent) and blacks (6.5 percent); ten years later, the Latino population had decreased by over 60 percent and the black population by more than 30 percent. This was a period that witnessed Lakeview’s arrival as a younger, more swinging real estate rival of the more affluent Lincoln Park area to its south. But many of the young middle-class professionals moving there were not only attracted to its proximity to the lake, its tree-lined streets, and its vibrant commercial strips of eclectic restaurants, bars, cafés, boutiques, and fitness clubs along Broadway and Halsted; by the end of the 1980s, the segment of North Halsted between Clark and Addison had become the center of gay nightlife in Chicago—and of the entire Midwest for that matter. And when Boystown’s real estate values rose too high and its bar scene became too raucous for some, those seeking the trappings of an urban gay community began moving north to Andersonville—a historically Swedish subsection of the Edgewater community area, where rainbow flags could be seen adorning bars along Clark Street by the mid-1990s.

  A good many of those settling in neighborhoods like Boystown and Andersonville, gay and straight alike, belonged to what Richard Florida has called the “creative class”: people working in design, education, arts, music, entertainment, advertising, and marketing, “whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content.”128 Due to its rather large immigrant, gay, and “bohemian” populations, Florida placed Chicago in the top twenty cities possessing the kind of creative and diverse social and cultural milieus that ap
peal to this new class of workers. Sociologist Terry Nichols Clark has argued that Mayor Richard Daley actively helped to make this happen by incorporating the creative class into the city’s culture and politics and ultimately treating it like another ethnic group in need of space to express its identity.129 There is no doubt some truth to this contention. One could argue that Millennium Park, with its high-concept design, was an enormous gesture in this direction. Other examples can be drawn from Daley’s at times flamboyant embrace of the gay community and all his administration did to help turn Wicker Park into a national icon for hipster culture in the 1990s.130

  But this should not blind us once again to how much the people still play a role in making Chicago’s neighborhoods. Richard Sennett employs the term disorder to describe the kind of diverse environment cities must aspire to bring about in order to become places where people will acquire the tools to deal with social challenges.131 Chicago, despite some very long odds, retained some of its disorder despite the rapid advance of neoliberalization during the Richard M. Daley era, and it did so, in part, because disorder was still in relatively high demand—even as those seeking this precious commodity, bohemians and yuppies alike, were unwittingly contributing to its disappearance.

  Epilogue

  On a spotlessly clear but unseasonably chilly Monday in May 2011, with a turquoise lake fronting its shoreline and uninterrupted blue backing its iridescent skyline, Chicago looked to those attending the inauguration of its new mayor like it rightly belonged near the top of the list of the most economically powerful cities in the world.1 And yet things were not how they appeared on the surface. The man being sworn in that day, Rahm Emanuel, was taking the helm of a city mired in crippling financial problems. His transition team had estimated that the city faced a $700 million budget shortfall the following year, and that figure did not include unfunded pension obligations or the $700 million deficit afflicting the school system. Chicago’s tax revenues had plummeted. The city had lost more than 200,000 residents in the previous decade, depleting the ranks of taxpayers. The Great Recession also hit hard, eliminating some 30,000 jobs between 2009 and 2010 alone. Chicago was also operating without the critical revenue its parking meters and downtown garages had once provided. Filling this gap was going to take some imaginative, if not supernatural, solutions. Just across the Chicago River from the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, where Mayor Emanuel delivered his first mayoral speech that day, lay a striking symbol of Chicago’s financial troubles: a cavernous 110-foot-diameter, 76-foot-deep hole in the ground, where the world’s second tallest building, the Chicago Spire, was supposed to have stood—before the financial crisis turned it into a local joke and urban legend. Five years later, the hole was still there and its owner, Related Midwest, was paying workers to create an artificial embankment out of dirt to hide the sight of the gaping hole from surrounding buildings. As bad as all this seemed, things could get a lot worse. In fact, a sort of doomsday scenario was lurking in the not-so-distant future, when Chicago would be forced to begin filling an even bigger hole: the nearly $20 billion gap in its public pension funds.

  For all these reasons, Emanuel’s transition team had planned a rather low-key inauguration—“festive but not too festive,” the Tribune reported.2 The chosen theme was, ironically enough for this city of stark racial segregation and economic inequality, “togetherness.” The celebrations began on Saturday, May 14, with community volunteering in the neighborhoods—planting flowers and picking up trash—followed by a free concert in Grant Park. The swearing-in ceremony two days later was carefully conceived to project this same earnest spirit of civic unity and responsibility. The music for the event was provided by the Chicago Children’s Choir, a “multiracial, multicultural choral music education organization” formed in 1956 by a white Hyde Park minister to symbolize the ideal of racial unity as the walls of the ghetto were hardening nearby. True to form, the group delivered its own rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” When Mayor Emanuel finally took the podium, after being sworn in by—fittingly enough—Harold Washington’s former floor leader Timothy Evans, now chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, he immediately struck the same tone. “We must face the truth,” Emanuel pronounced. “It is time to take on the challenges that threaten the very future of our city: the quality of our schools, the safety of our streets, the cost and effectiveness of city government, and the urgent need to create the jobs of the future.” The reasons why one of the mightiest cities in the world faced such challenges in the first place, Emanuel seemed to imply, had little to do with the city’s political leadership. With former mayor Richard M. Daley by his side, he hailed the Pritzker Pavilion and Millennium Park surrounding it as symbolic of a new Chicago: “Through Mayor Daley’s vision, determination and leadership, this place, like our city, was reborn.”

  The inauguration was neither the time nor the place to lay blame for Chicago’s fiscal woes, and even if it was, Emanuel, who had been initiated into Chicago politics by Richard Daley back in 1989, was not about to go biting the hand that had fed him. This he would do in the turbulent years to come, when, for example, he would refer to Daley’s parking meter privatization deal as a “lemon” that constituted “a bad deal for our city and a bad contract for our residents.” For now, another kind of moral to the story was being constructed out of all this celebration of togetherness and civic duty. With little to go on in terms of an explanation about the causes of the quagmire the city now faced, Chicagoans, in some sense, were left with only themselves to blame. What else could explain all of the exhortations to residents to do their part in pulling together and improving the city? In the spirit of the neoliberal age, Emanuel called on parents to help solve the problem of failing schools through better parenting and on ordinary residents to help police deal with the problem of rising homicide rates in low-income neighborhoods by being better informants. “So today, I ask of each of you, those who live here, and those who work here, business and labor: let us share the necessary sacrifices fairly and justly,” the mayor said. If this sounded a lot like a prelude to austerity, that’s because that is exactly what it was.

  And yet a very different message was being conveyed to Emanuel’s coterie of VIPs, who, for $50,000 could buy the status of inauguration “co-chair,” a deal that included a seat on stage at the Pritzker Pavilion and access to a swish reception at the Venue 1 event center in the West Loop. The message of the shadow inauguration was that there was still plenty of money to be made in the new era of austerity, and the old rules would still apply. As Richard M. Daley’s senior strategist and chief fundraiser during his first successful election campaign, Emanuel had effectively ushered in the age of pinstripe patronage in Chicago. In 2010 he had used his old Rolodex to amass an $11.8 million campaign fund, a new record in Chicago politics, with sizable donations from folks like Steven Spielberg, Donald Trump, and future Illinois governor Bruce Rauner. This was four times the amount raised by his closest competitor Gerry Chico, Daley’s chief of staff between 1992 and 1995 and a former president of both the Chicago School and Park District boards, and more than twenty-five times the amount raised by the leading black candidate, former Illinois senator Carol Moseley Braun. Even if Emanuel only managed 55 percent of the vote against a listless field of challengers, he had demonstrated that he clearly meant business, and business took notice.

  It was thus no surprise that despite branding himself as the candidate of change during the campaign, Emanuel effectively picked up where his predecessor had left off. If something was new, it was the pace and intensity of austerity. Daley had wrangled with the Amalgamated Transit Union over who should pay to fill the chronic operating gap ($155 million in 2009) of the country’s second largest public transit system, imposing budget constraints that led to significant service cuts, fare hikes, and the laying off of over one thousand workers in 2010. But this was mere child’s play compared with the slash-and-burn austerity program Emanuel unleashed. Emanuel’s 2012 budget, approved by a 50–0 vote of
the city council contained “reforms and efficiencies” that would save taxpayers more than $406 million. The reforms and efficiencies, however, came with some crushing social costs. Chicago shuttered six out of its twelve mental health clinics, closed its neighborhood branch libraries on Mondays, and laid off some 32 percent of the city’s library workers. Needless to say, most of the mental health clinics closed were located in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods, like Woodlawn, Logan Square, and the Back of the Yards—the same kinds of communities that had been most affected by the recent CTA service cuts. Patients transferred to the far North Side began complaining that hour-long commutes were deterring them from seeking treatment.

  However, the full brunt of Emanuel’s austerity program did not hit the city until after the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) dared to challenge it in September 2012, when it rallied 26,000 teachers and support staff to conduct the first teachers’ strike in the city in twenty-five years. While the Emanuel administration portrayed the strike in bread-and-butter terms, the salary and health-care cost issues were, in reality, less contentious than a range of other matters. The teachers took to the streets in large part to oppose Emanuel’s grand scheme—inherited from Daley and his schools CEO Arne Duncan—to overhaul Chicago’s public education system by closing public schools and replacing them with privately run charter schools. In particular, the CTU challenged the new rules and practices established by Illinois legislators at the behest of Mayor Emanuel to help pave the way towards privatization—for example, a layoff process dependent on teacher evaluations rather than seniority and an evaluation process, in the spirit of the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, based partly on student performance on standardized tests.

 

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