Book Read Free

Chicago on the Make

Page 50

by Andrew J. Diamond


  61. Travel Industry Association of America, “Direct Impact of Travel to Chicago,” www.choosechicago.com. Choose Chicago was the official destination marketing organization for the city of Chicago in 2012.

  62. This estimate of manufacturing jobs lost comes from a study financed by the United States Department of Labor: Chicago Federation of Labor and Center for Labor and Community Research, “Creating a Manufacturing Career Path System in Cook County (December 2001),” archived at http://www.clcr.org/.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Data derived from Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Report (EEO-4) for the City of Chicago, 1980–1999, Municipal Reference Section, Harold Washington Library, Chicago.

  65. Larry Bennett, Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 95.

  66. Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1989.

  67. Michael B. Katz, “Why Don’t American Cities Burn Very Often,” Journal of Urban History 34 (2008), 185–208.

  68. This argument was made powerfully in: Adolph Reed, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

  69. Pattillo, Black on the Block.

  70. Katz, “Why Don’t American Cities Burn Very Often,” 196.

  71. The best sociological study of the culture of basketball in black Chicago is the brilliant documentary Hoop Dreams (1994), which follows the lives of two budding basketball stars over eight years.

  72. See, for example, Reuben A. Buford May, Living through the Hoop: High School Basketball, Race, and the American Dream (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

  73. Historians are just beginning to explore how this massive wave of Mexican immigration offset the forces of deindustrialization and depopulation. See A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban America,” Journal of American History 101 (December 2014), 804–31.

  74. For a comprehensive report criticizing these privatization schemes, see Tony Dutzik, Brian Imus, and Phineas Baxandall, Privatization and the Public Interest: The Need for Transparency and Accountability in Chicago’s Public Asset Lease Deals (Chicago: Illinois PIRG Education Fund, 2009), www.illinoispirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Privatization-and-the-Public-Interest.pdf.

  75. Daley claimed the action was necessary to protect the city from a possible terrorist plot.

  76. Cathy J. Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 175.

  77. Dominic Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett, Chicago: City of Neighborhoods: Histories and Tours (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986).

  78. During these years, a list of these neighborhood festivals could be found on the City of Chicago’s official tourism website www.explorechicago.org.

  79. City of Chicago, Office of Tourism and Culture, Chicago Neighborhood Tours 2009: Discover the World in Our Backyard (Chicago: Office of Tourism and Culture, 2009), accessed from www.ChicagoNeighborhoodTours.com in 2009. In 2012, Mayor Rahm Emanuel eliminated the Office of Tourism and Culture, with its tourism functions thereafter subcontracted out to the private-sector nonprofit Choose Chicago and its culture responsibilities taken up by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.

  80. Timothy Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 220. It is important to point out that Harold Washington’s support of Chicago’s gay community had paved the way for Daley’s embrace of Boystown as a key constituency. After Washington’s death, an impressive voter registration campaign called Lesbian/Gay Voter Impact had managed to add over 17,000 new voters in heavily gay areas of the Forty-Fourth, Forty-Sixth, Forty-Eighth, and Fiftieth Wards. Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout, 180.

  81. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).

  82. Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout, 221.

  83. Neil Smith, “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy” in Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe, ed. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002).

  84. It might appear to some that the idea of an active state in the process of gentrification seems to contradict the view of Richard M. Daley’s program as neoliberal. This is not the case. What distinguishes neoliberalism from classical liberalism is the key part played by the state in unleashing the forces of the free market and promoting the role of private capital.

  85. Pattillo, Black on the Block, 259–62.

  86. John J. Betancur, Isabel Domeyko, and Patricia A. Wright, Gentrification in West Town: Contested Ground (Chicago: Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2001), 19, www.urbancenter.utoronto.ca/pdfs/curp/Chicago_Gentrification-in-W.pdf.

  87. Ibid., 20.

  88. Pilsen is part of the Lower West Side community area. The Mexican community in this part of the city, however, extends westward across Western Avenue into the South Lawndale community area (also known as Little Village or La Villita), where, by the 1990s, Mexicans constituted over 80 percent of the population.

  89. Chicago Sun-Times, May 23, 2003.

  90. According to the 2010 census, African Americans constituted about 41 percent of the population of the Humboldt Park community area, but they remained largely segregated in the southwest quadrant below Grand Avenue bordering the Garfield Park neighborhood. Latinos represented over 52 percent.

  91. This quote appeared in the mission statement on the Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s website in 2011. The current statement mentions the importance of promoting “a holistic vision of community wellness and stability” but now omits any reference to “development” goals. See http://prcc-chgo.org/.

  92. Antonio Olivo, “Edgy about ‘Yuppies,’” Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2006; I discovered this from Bennett, Third City, 135.

  93. John Betancur, “Gentrification before Gentrification: The Plight of Pilsen in Chicago,” (White Paper, Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement, University of Illinois–Chicago, 2005), 33.

  94. On UNO’s Alinskyite approach, see Wilfred Cruz, “UNO: Organizing at the Grassroots,” Illinois Issues (April 1988). In 2011, UNO’s website made no mention of the goal of affordable housing or the fight against pollution. Midwest Generation, the owner of the two coal plants, contributed $50,000 to Alderman Solis for his 2011 reelection campaign.

  95. Betancur, “Gentrification before Gentrification,” 26.

  96. Chicago Tribune, November 28, 2008.

  97. This was due to the fact that Logan Square’s population was twice the size of Pilsen’s (referred to as the Lower West Side on the Chicago community area map). According to the 2010 U.S. census, Logan Square, which was about two-thirds “Hispanic” (the term employed by the census), had a total population of over 72,000; Pilsen possessed a population of just under 36,000, nearly 89 percent of which was Hispanic.

  98. In the 1980s, thirteen residents of the Humboldt Park barrio were arrested for their association with the Fuerzas Armadas para la Liberacion Nacional (FALN), a terrorist group that claimed responsibility for a series of attacks against U.S. military installations; in 1995, the FBI investigated several teachers and administrators at Humboldt Park’s Roberto Clemente High School for terrorist activities—a situation that received a great deal of media scrutiny in Chicago.

  99. On the gentrification of the Lower East Side, see Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York, 1880–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); William Sites, Remaking New York: Primitive Globalization and the Politics of Urban Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

  100. Richard Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 7
6–82.

  101. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Methuen, 1979), 102–6.

  102. Chicago Tribune, January 27, 2008.

  103. Chicago Tribune, August 21, 2008.

  104. The new Near North Side branch, with an initial collection of thirty thousand titles and a number of personal computers, replaced a makeshift “reading room” occupying the second floor of the Seward Park fieldhouse.

  105. Chicago Sun-Times, March 30, 2011.

  106. For an excellent account of the policy and planning decisions that led to the failure of Chicago’s public housing program between the 1940s and 1990s, see D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

  107. Brian J. Miller, “The Struggle over Redevelopment at Cabrini-Green, 1989–2004,” Journal of Urban History 34 (May 2008), 947–48.

  108. Brian Rogal, “The Habitat Company: Private Firm Keeps Tight Grips on Public Housing,” Chicago Reporter, November, 1999.

  109. ABLA is the acronym for the massive Near West Side complex composed of the Jane Addams Homes, Robert Brooks Homes, Loomis Courts, and Grace Abbott Homes.

  110. Under the Section 8 voucher program, individuals or families with a voucher could rent in the private housing market and, based on their income, pay no more than 30 percent for rent.

  111. See, for example, Susan J. Popkin and Mary Cunningham, CHA Relocation Counseling and Assessment: Interim Report (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2001), http://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/61641/410313-CHA-Relocation-Counseling-Assesment-Interim-Report.PDF.

  112. Quoted in Karen Hawkins, “Emanuel Inherits Complex Public Housing Legacy,” Associated Press, May 18, 2011. Venkatesh had followed the relocation situation after spending two years at the Robert Taylor Homes to complete his pathbreaking study. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of Modern Ghetto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  113. Adolph L. Reed, Jr., “When Government Shrugs: Lessons of Katrina,” The Progressive, September, 2006.

  114. Chicago Journal, May 19, 2010; The Gazette, June 4, 2010.

  115. The CHA Admissions and Continued Occupancy Policy guidelines can be found at www.thecha.org/.

  116. These are terms employed by Mary Pattillo in Black on the Block.

  117. Naomi J. McCormick, Mark L. Joseph, and Robert J. Chaskin, “The New Stigma of Relocated Public Housing Residents: Challenges to Social Identity in Mixed-Income Developments,” City and Community 11, no. 3 (2012), 296–97.

  118. John P. Koval and Kenneth Fidel, “Chicago: The Immigrant Capital of the Heartland,” in The New Chicago, ed. John P. Koval et al., 97–104.

  119. Brookings Institution, Chicago in Focus, 22. The black-Puerto Rican dissimilarity index was even higher than the black-Mexican dissimilarity index.

  120. “Census 2000: Whole Population, Segregation,” Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, the University at Albany, SUNY, http://mumford.albany.edu/census/.

  121. Indians are the largest Asian subgroup in the Chicago six-county metropolitan area, with some 115,000 people.

  122. Kiljoong Kim, “The Korean Presence in Chicago,” in The New Chicago, ed. John P. Koval et al., 159.

  123. The Chicago metropolitan area was a major destination for these groups. Between 1965 and 2000, 15 percent of all Palestinians and Jordanians and 13 percent of all Iraqis entering the country settled in Illinois. See Louise Cainkar, “Immigrants from the Arab World,” in The New Chicago, ed. John P. Koval et al., 185.

  124. Mary Patrice Erdmans, “New Chicago Polonia: Urban and Suburban,” in The New Chicago, ed. John P. Koval et al., 123.

  125. A description of the gate’s history can be found on the Chicago Chinatown Chamber of Commerce website, www.chicagochinatown.org.

  126. Ben Joravsky, “Signs of the Times: In Albany Park, a Dispute over ‘Seoul Drive and Korea Town,’” Chicago Reader, April 29, 1993. The revolt caused the city council to rescind the initially proposed “Korea Town” designation and to shorten the part of Lawrence to be named Seoul Drive.

  127. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Table 39, Nativity and Place of Birth of Resident Population for Cities of 100,000 or More,” Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2011.

  128. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Perseus Book Group, 2002), 8.

  129. Nichols Clark was quoted in Richard Florida, “The Rise of the Creative Class: Why Cities without Gays and Rock Bands Are Losing the Economic Development Race,” Washington Monthly, May 2002.

  130. Wicker Park’s arrival on the national scene came with the release of Stephen Frears’s film High Fidelity, in which the neighborhood is a backdrop for a love story between two young bohemians. For an excellent account of Daley’s incorporation of Boystown’s gay community into his coalition, see Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout, chap. 8.

  131. Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (New York: Norton, 1992).

  EPILOGUE

  1. According to Richard Florida’s 2011 “Global Economic Power Index” (City Lab, www.citylab.com/), a measure of economic output, global financial influence, and innovation (based on patenting activity), Chicago was the fourth most economically powerful city in the world—behind only Tokyo, New York, and London (and just ahead of Paris).

  2. Chicago Tribune, May 10, 2011.

  3. Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2008.

  4. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007), 6.

  5. Micah Uetricht, Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity (New York: Verso, 2014), 33.

  6. For a detailed account of CORE’s dramatic rise within the CTU, see Uetricht, Strike for America; and Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 4.

  7. Uetricht, Strike for America, 37.

  8. Quoted in McAlevey, No Shortcuts, 124.

  9. Chicago Tribune, September 14, 2014.

  10. Chicago Reader, March 26, 2015.

  11. Teresa L. Cordova and Matthew D. Wilson, Lost: The Crisis of Jobless and Out of School Teens and Young Adults in Chicago, Illinois and the U.S. (Chicago: Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago, January 2106), https://greatcities.uic.edu/2016/02/01/lost-the-crisis-of-jobless-and-out-of-school-teens-and-young-adults-in-chicago-illinois-and-the-u-s/.

  12. Chicago Sun-Times, November 16, 2015.

  13. By 2016 Chicago had the highest sales tax in the United States.

  14. Beyza Buyuker, Melissa Mouritsen, and Dick Simpson, Continuing the Rubber Stamp City Council, Chicago City Council Report Number 7, June 8, 2011–November 15, 2014 (Chicago: Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, December 9, 2014), 1–4, https://pols.uic.edu/political-science/chicago-politics/city-council-voting-records.

  15. Among Chicago’s talented group of investigative journalists are Rick Perlstein, Ben Joravsky, Dan Mihalopoulos, Mick Dumke, Whet Moser, and David Moberg.

  16. The nickname “Mayor 1%” was popularized by Kari Lyderson, Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicago’s 99% (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).

  17. New York Times, March 21, 2015.

  18. The data can be easily accessed on the Invisible Institute’s website: http://invisible.institute/police-data/.

  19. The struggle for the level 1 trauma center ended triumphantly, with the University of Chicago breaking ground on a $39 million department in September of 2016.

  20. Juliana Menasce Horowitz and Gretchen Livingston, “How Americans View the Black Lives Matter Movement,” Fact Tank: News in the Numbers, Pew Research Center, July 8, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/08/how-americans-view-the-black-lives-matter-movement/.

  INDEX

  Note: Richard J. Daley
is sometimes referred to as RJD. Richard M. Daley is sometimes referred to as RMD. Page numbers in italics indicate an illustration.

  Abbott Laboratories, 97

  Abbott, Robert Sengstacke, 62, 79, 84; and black capitalism, 64, 66–67, 78–79, 90; and BSCP union, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83. See also Chicago Defender

  Aberdeens (Irish gang), 44

  ABLA (public housing), 310, 311, 372n109

  ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union): and drug testing of subsidized housing residents, 312; and political surveillance by Chicago, 197, 212; and South Deering, 132–133

  ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), 292

  Action Now Institute, 329

  ACT organization, 182, 183, 184–185, 186, 195, 197

  Addams, Jane (Hull House), 16, 18–19, 24, 29, 31, 33

  Adler, Jeffrey, 17

  Adler Planetarium, 285

  advertising industry, 204, 228

  affirmative action, 236, 275, 288, 363n45

  AFL (American Federation of Labor), 56–57, 83, 96

  African American community of Chicago: black-Latino dissimilarity index (segregation), 313–314; black-Latino social distance, 336–337; Jane Byrne and, 250–251; cabinet of RMD including, 288; as center of national black life, 117, 137; clubwomen and black liberal politics, 87; clubwomen and mobilization for the BSCP, 80, 84–85; credit card debt and, 289; early 20th century locations throughout the city, 24; ethnoracial hierarchy and, 27; fatalism/pessimism/nihilism of, 74–75, 154, 276–277, 293–294, 333; in labor force, 63; map of ethnic Chicago (2000), 316; median income, 117, 266; mental health clinic closures and, 325–326; mortality rate of, 75; mural movement and, 219–220, 220; school closures and, 271, 326–327; school reforms as leaving behind, 270–271, 272–273; school suspensions and expulsions and, 270–271; service economy and, 286–287; strikebreaking laborers from, 25–26, 27–28, 29, 110; support for R.M. Daley, 7; support for R.J. Daley, 135, 136–137; support for R.M. Daley, 273, 278, 280–281, 287–289; support for Rahm Emanuel, 334–335; unemployment among, 266, 270, 331; veterans returning from wars, 38, 106, 109, 112; Harold Washington mobilization by, 243–244, 249. See also black capitalism; black church; black cultural expression; black gangs; black ghettos; black middle class; black power movement; black press; black resistance to racial oppression; black submachine politics; civil rights movement; culturalization of politics; migration of African Americans from the South; police (CPD)—violence against African Americans; violence/racial violence

 

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