There Are No Children Here

by Alex Kotlowitz

  But during the summer of 1987, when drugs and the accompanying violence swept through the neighborhood, she lived in daily fear that something might happen to her young ones. Though she would never say as much, she worried that they might not make it to their eighteenth birthday. Too many hadn’t. Already that year, fifty-seven children had been killed in the city. Five had died in the Horner area, including two, aged eight and six, who died from smoke inhalation when firefighters had to climb the fourteen stories to their apartment. Both of the building’s elevators were broken. Lafeyette and Pharoah knew of more funerals than weddings.

  So that summer LaJoe wanted to be prepared for the worst. She started paying $80 a month for burial insurance for Lafeyette, Pharoah, and the four-year-old triplets.

  Lafeyette had promised his mother he wouldn’t let anything happen to Pharoah. But for a brief moment, he thought he had lost him.

  Three days after Lafeyette’s birthday, gunfire once again filled the air. It was two-thirty in the afternoon; school had just let out. As Lafeyette and his mother hustled the triplets onto the floor of the apartment’s narrow hallway, a drill they now followed almost instinctually, they caught glimpses through the windows of young gunmen waving their pistols about. One youth toted a submachine gun.

  The dispute had started when two rival drug gangs fired at each other from one high-rise to another.

  From his first-floor apartment, Lafeyette, who had left his fifth-grade class early that day, watched hopefully for Pharoah as the children poured out of the Henry Suder Elementary School, just a block away. Panicking, many of the youngsters ran directly toward the gunfire. Lafeyette and his mother screamed at the children to turn back. But they kept coming, clamoring for the shelter of their homes.

  Lafeyette finally spotted his brother, first running, then walking, taking cover behind trees and fences. But then he lost sight of him. “Mama, lemme go get him. Lemme go,” Lafeyette begged. He was afraid that Pharoah would run straight through the gunfire. Pharoah would later say he had learned to look both ways and that’s why he’d started walking. “My mama told me when you hear the shooting, first to walk because you don’t know where the bullets are coming,” he explained. LaJoe refused Lafeyette’s request to let him go after his brother. She couldn’t even go herself. The guns kept crackling.

  Lafeyette’s friend James, who was cowering behind a nearby tree, sprinted for the Riverses’ apartment. Pharoah saw him and ran, too. The two frantically pounded with their fists on the metal door. “Let us in!” James wailed. “Let us in! It’s James and Pharoah!” James’s heart was beating so hard that he could hear it above the commotion. But with all the noise, no one heard their frenzied pleas, and the two ran to a friend’s apartment upstairs.

  Meanwhile, the police, who at first thought they were the targets of the shooting, had taken cover in their cars and in the building’s breezeway. Passersby lay motionless on the ground, protected by parked vehicles and a snow-cone vending stand. Then, as suddenly as it began, the battle ended. No one, amazingly, had been hurt. Lafeyette learned later that one errant bullet pierced a friend’s third-floor window with such force that it cut through a closet door and lodged in the cinder-block wall.

  The police made no arrests. And when a reporter called the police department’s central headquarters the next day, he was told that there was no record of the shoot-out.

  But Lafeyette knew. So did Pharoah.

  Three

  THOUGH ONLY four years old at the time, LaJoe forever remembered the day she and her family moved into the Henry Horner Homes. It was October 15, 1956, a Monday.

  The complex was so new that some of the buildings had yet to be completed. Thick paths of mud ran where the sidewalks should have been. A thin, warped plank of wood substituted for the unbuilt steps.

  But to LaJoe and her brothers and sisters, it all looked dazzling. The building’s brand-new bricks were a deep and luscious red, and they were smooth and solid to the touch. The clean windows reflected the day’s movements with a shimmering clarity that gave the building an almost magical quality. Even the two unfinished buildings, one to the west and one to the south, their concrete frames still exposed, appeared stately.

  It was quiet and peaceful; there were not even any passersby. On this unusually warm fall day—the temperature topped 70 degrees by noon—LaJoe could even hear the shrill songs of the sparrows. The building, 1920 West Washington, stood empty. They were to be the first family to occupy one of its sixty-five apartments.

  LaJoe’s father, Roy Anderson, pulled the car and its trailer up to the building’s back entrance. He was a ruggedly handsome man whose steely stare belied his affable nature and his affection for children. He and his wife, Lelia Mae, had been eagerly awaiting this move. They and their thirteen children, including three sets of twins, had been living in a spacious five-bedroom apartment, but the coal-heated flat got so cold in the winter that the pipes frequently froze. On those days they fetched their water from a fire hydrant. The apartment was above a Baptist church, and there were times when the rooms overflowed with the wailings of funerals or the joyful songs accompanying baptisms. And the building canted to the east, so whenever a truck passed, the floors and walls shook vigorously, sometimes scaring the children into thinking the entire structure might collapse.

  For Lelia Mae and Roy their south side apartment seemed adequate enough. Both had come from the shacks and the shanties of the South. Lelia Mae had left Charleston, West Virginia, at the age of twenty in 1937. Her father had been a coal miner and a part-time preacher for the Ebenezer Baptist Church. She headed for Chicago, where she’d been told she could make good money. Her older sister, who had moved to Chicago a few years earlier, promised Lelia Mae to get her a job in the laundry where she worked. Once in Chicago, Lelia Mae, already divorced and with one child, met her second husband, Roy, who worked in one of the city’s numerous steel mills. Roy hailed from Camden, Arkansas, where his father had been the deacon of a Baptist church. Roy was a spiffy dresser whose trademark was a small Stetson; it balanced with astounding ease on his large, dignified head.

  The two had raised their family in the second-floor Chicago apartment above the church, but their home was to be demolished to make way for a university building, part of the new Illinois Institute of Technology, and they had to move. They were given the opportunity to move into public housing, the grand castles being built for the nation’s urban poor.

  In the middle and late 1950s, publicly financed high-rise complexes sprang up across the country like dandelions in a rainy spring. In 1949, Congress, in addressing a postwar housing crisis, had authorized loans and subsidies to construct 810,000 units of low-rent housing units nationwide. At the time, it was viewed as an impressive effort to provide shelter for the less fortunate.

  But the program’s controversial beginnings were an ominous sign of what lay ahead. White politicians wanted neither poor nor black families in their communities, and they resisted the publicly financed housing. In over seventy communities, public housing opponents brought the issue before the electorate in referenda. In California, voters amended the state constitution so that all public housing projects required their approval. In Detroit, a 14,350-unit public housing program was reduced when a public housing opponent was elected mayor. In Chicago, the opposition was fierce. The city’s aldermen first bullied the state legislature into giving them the power of selecting public housing sites, a prerogative that had previously belonged to the local housing authority.

  Then a group of leading aldermen, who were not above petty vindictiveness, chartered a bus to tour the city in search of potential sites. On the bus ride, they told reporters that they were out to seek vengeance against the Chicago Housing Authority and the seven aldermen who supported public housing, and they chose sites in neighborhoods represented by these aldermen. Like prankish teenagers, they selected the most outrageous of possibilities, including the tennis courts at the University of Chicago and a parcel of land
that sat smack in the middle of a major local highway. The message was clear: the CHA and its liberal backers could build public housing but not in their back yards.

  The complexes were not, in the end, built at these sites. Instead, they were constructed on the edges of the city’s black ghettoes. Rather than providing alternatives to what had become decrepit living conditions, public housing became anchors for existing slums. And because there were few sites available, the housing authority had no alternative but to build up rather than out. So the ghettoes grew toward the heavens, and public housing became a bulwark of urban segregation.

  On the city’s near west side, on the periphery of one of the city’s black ghettoes, was built the Henry Horner Homes. The complex of sixteen high-rises bore the name of an Illinois governor best known for his obsession with Abraham Lincoln and his penchant for bucking the Chicago Democratic machine.

  The buildings were constructed on the cheap. There were no lobbies to speak of, only the open breezeways. There was no communication system from the breezeways to the tenants. During the city’s harsh winters, elevator cables froze; in one year alone the housing authority in Chicago needed to make over fifteen-hundred elevator repairs. And that was in just one development.

  The trash chutes within each building were too narrow to handle the garbage of all its tenants. The boiler systems continually broke down. There were insufficient overhead lighting installations and wall outlets in each unit. And the medicine cabinet in each apartment’s bathroom was not only easily removed, but was connected to the medicine chest in the adjoining apartment. Over the years, residents had been robbed, assaulted, and even murdered by people crawling through their medicine cabinet.

  When a group of Soviet housing officials visited Henry Horner in October of 1955, while it was still under construction, they were appalled that the walls in the apartments were of cinder block. Why not build plastered walls, they suggested. “We would be thrown off our jobs in Moscow if we left unfinished walls like this,” I. K. Kozvilia, minister of city and urban construction in the Soviet Union, told local reporters.

  “In the American way of doing things,” huffed The Chicago Daily News in an editorial the next day, “there is little use for luxury in building subsidized low-cost housing.” It was no surprise, then, that thirteen years later a federal report on public housing would describe Henry Horner and the city’s other developments as “remindful of gigantic filing cabinets with separate cubicles for each human household.”

  But on this day, LaJoe and her siblings were bubbling over with joy at the sight of their new home. It was, after all, considerably prettier and sturdier and warmer than the flat they’d left behind. Before their father could unload the rented trailer and hand his children the picnic table, which he planned to use in the kitchen, and the cots, which he hoped to replace soon with bunk beds, they ran into the newly finished building. He and his wife could only smile at the children’s excitement.

  LaJoe’s older sister, LaGreta, then seven, urged the others into the apartment. As LaJoe scurried through the open doorway, they counted off the five bedrooms in delighted giggles. They were struck by the apartment’s immensity; the hallway seemed to go on forever, one room following another and another and another. What’s more, the freshly painted walls shone a glistening white; even the brown linoleum floors had a luster to them. The youngest children found the coziness of the doorless closets inviting; LaJoe’s infant twin brothers spent much of the first day playing in one. And because of the apartment’s first-floor location, the older children quickly learned, they could exit through the windows, a route they would use in their teens when they wanted to leave unseen by their mother.

  In those early years, the children of Horner thrived. LaJoe and LaGreta joined the Girl Scouts. They attended dances and roller-skating parties in their building’s basement. They delighted in the new playground, which boasted swings, sliding boards, and a jungle gym. Their brothers frequented the project’s grass baseball diamond, which was regularly mowed.

  All of them spent time at the spanking new Boys Club, which had a gym and in later years an indoor Olympic-size swimming pool. On Friday nights, the family attended fish fries. LaJoe joined the 250-member Drum and Bugle Corps, a group so popular among the area’s youth that some came from two miles away to participate. The marching teenagers, attired in white shirts, thin black ties, and black jackets, were a common sight in city parades.

  The Anderson children were exposed to politics as well. Their mother was active in the local Democratic Party, and politicians, from aldermen to United States senators, would visit the complex and on occasion stop by the Andersons’ home. Elected officials paid attention to the people’s concerns. They had to. People were well organized. In the 1960s, area residents formed the Miles Square Federation, which vigorously fought for better schools and health clinics. The Black Panthers’ city headquarters was only a few blocks from Horner. Martin Luther King, Jr., on his visits to the city would preach at the First Congregational Baptist Church.

  Nurtured by a strong sense of community as well as the programs at the Boys Club and other social agencies, Henry Horner boasted numerous success stories: an executive at a Fortune 500 company, a principal of one of the city’s top parochial schools, the medical director of a nearby hospital, and a professor at a local university.

  On that first day at Horner, the Anderson family knew only hope and pride. The future seemed bright. The moment, particularly for the children, was nearly blissful. Lelia Mae made doughnuts to celebrate and played Sam Cooke and Nat King Cole albums on her hi-fi through the evening. That night, in one of the back bedrooms, the sisters lay on their narrow cots and stared out the windows. Because there was no one yet living in the building and few streetlights, they could clearly see the moon and the stars. They had their very own window on the universe.

  LaJoe held on tightly to those early memories because so much had since gone sour. By the 1970s, the housing authority ran out of money to paint the apartments. The cinder-block walls became permanently smudged and dirty. The building’s bricks faded. The windows had collected too heavy a coat of grime to reflect much of anything. In 1975, someone, to this day unknown, strangled one of LaJoe’s grown sisters in her bathtub. The oldest brother, home on leave from the Marines, died of a heart attack that day on hearing the news. LaJoe’s parents moved out of Horner because of the murder. Roy died of bone cancer in 1982.

  LaJoe hadn’t moved far since that fall day in 1956; she was just down the hall, where she now lived with Lafeyette, Pharoah, her two oldest sons, Paul and Terence, and the triplets.

  “When I got my apartment I thought this is what it was meant to be,” she said thirty-one years later. “I never looked any further than here. It wasn’t like it is now. The grass was greener. We had light poles on the front of the building. We had little yellow flowers. We had it all. I really thought this was it. And I never knew, until I lost it all, that it wasn’t.”

  By 1987, the thirty-four acre Henry Horner complex wasn’t the largest of the city’s nineteen public housing developments. That title went to the two-mile long Robert Taylor Homes, which was home to fifteen thousand people. Nor was Henry Horner the most dangerous. That distinction alternately went to Rockwell Gardens, a neighboring complex, and Cabrini-Green, which in 1981 was the site of so many shootings—eleven killed and thirty-seven wounded in the first two months—that the city’s mayor, Jane Byrne, chose to move in. Along with a contingent of police and bodyguards, she stayed for three weeks to help restore order. Some, including LaJoe, viewed the move as gutsy and brave. But that single act by Byrne, more than any murder or plea for help, highlighted the isolation and alienation of these poor, mostly black inner-city islands. It was as if the mayor, with her entourage of police, advisers, and reporters, had deigned to visit some distant and perilous Third World country—except that Cabrini-Green sat barely eight blocks from the mayor’s posh Gold Coast apartment.

  Henry Horner’s
buildings range from seven to fifteen stories and cover eight blocks. The architect surely had an easy time designing the development, for it is only one block wide, leaving little room for experimentation with the placement of the high-rises. The buildings, with a few exceptions, line each side of the block, leaving the corridor in between for playground equipment, basketball courts, and parking lots. A narrow street once cut through the development’s midsection, but that has long since been displaced and is now part of the concrete play area. At first that pleased the parents, who worried about their children getting hit by speeding cars, but later it served to isolate parts of the complex even more, making it easier for criminals to operate with impunity.

  In the summer of 1987, six thousand people lived at Horner, four thousand of them children. They would quickly tell you that they dared not venture out at night. At Horner, for every one thousand residents there were approximately forty violent crimes reported, a rate nearly twice that of Chicago’s average.

  Inside their apartment’s hallway, Lafeyette and Pharoah huddled on the floor, sweating in the early July heat. Pharoah shook with each gun pop, his big eyes darting nervously from one end of the long hallway to the other. He clutched a garbage bag filled with aluminum cans he’d collected; his small body was curled up against the security of the cool concrete wall.

  The muscles in Lafeyette’s face tensed. He had his hands full, watching over Pharoah and the triplets. The young ones knew enough to stay in the windowless corridor away from possible stray bullets, but they chattered and fought until Tiffany, too restless to sit still for long, stood up. Lafeyette shoved her back down.

  “We wanna go,” whined Tiffany.

  “Be quiet,” admonished her brother. “You crazy?”

  The narrow hall of their four-bedroom apartment had become their fallout shelter. Stray bullets had zipped through their apartment before, once leaving two holes the size of nickels in the olive-green living room curtains. Another time a bullet found its way into the hallway; it had traveled through a bedroom window and the bedroom door, missing Terence by inches. The children now knew enough to sit away from the doorways.