On the residential streets east and west of Sheffield Avenue, larger buildings had been cut up into small apartments and housed as many as eighty people each. In the words of Erich Teske, who was growing up in Sheffield at the time, “Virtually every garage was covered with graffiti. The garbage was strewn over the alleys.” Residents who wanted to preserve a semblance of neatness used shovels to dump the trash into garbage cans. There were signs scattered throughout the neighborhood that read, in big black letters, RID YOUR BLOCK OF RATS. RATS EAT GARBAGE. CLEAN UP THE GARBAGE.
This was by no means a uniformly poor neighborhood. The median family income in census tract 710, on the blocks west of Sheffield, was $9,375 in 1970, only slightly below the national family median of $9,870. Thirteen percent of the people in tract 710 lived beneath the poverty line, a number that matched almost precisely the average for the nation as a whole. Tract 711, the neighborhood’s eastern half, was doing a little better. Its median family income was $11,392.
Many of the white ethnic families who had occupied Sheffield for generations continued to live there in 1970, but it was not the place they fondly remembered. Sheffield in 1970 was a dangerous place to be.
THE SITUATION did not change overnight, or even in a couple of years. No single event or series of events made Sheffield into something new. The most accurate thing to say is that something important was happening around the center of America’s third-largest city, and Sheffield gradually became part of it.
Certainly one can make a list of factors that contributed. Perhaps first among them, odd as it may seem, is Lake Michigan, a body of water that one can live indefinitely in Sheffield without even noticing.
It is sometimes difficult to explain to non-Chicagoans the mystical significance that the lake possesses. Civic leaders have traditionally talked about it as a civic achievement, almost as if they had built it. “You ride the length of Chicago,” the influential newspaper columnist Jack Mabley wrote in 1957, “and think that other cities, corruption or no, should have been able to produce something as beautiful.”
In a sense, the city actually did create Lake Michigan. For more than half a century of its existence, the lake absorbed massive amounts of industrial waste that flowed into it from the Chicago River. Year by year, the garbage dumped into the river turned the lake into more and more of an eyesore. Finally, at the beginning of the twentieth century, city engineers found a method of using canal locks to reverse the river’s flow, depositing the industrial garbage west into a new Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, returning the lake to the more or less pristine condition it had been in when Potawatomi Indians lived along its banks in the eighteenth century.
The engineers who performed this feat mainly felt that they were dealing with a public health nuisance, but they were doing much more than that. They were creating miles of clean blue lakefront suitable for boating, swimming, and other pleasures of urban life. The boosters are correct when they say that no other major lakefront city did this. Nearly all the others concentrated industry along their major waterfronts and left them unusable for much else, essentially creating a wall between the water and the city. More than a century later, most of them are still struggling with this problem. One is not drawn to the splendors of Lake Erie in Cleveland or Buffalo, or Lake Huron in Detroit.
But Chicago, whether it fully intended to or not, made a lakefront that was an attraction rather than an eyesore. When Richard J. Daley decided in the late 1950s that the city needed a whole new collection of high-rise apartment buildings, he had the shores of Lake Michigan to place them on. Of the high-rise apartment buildings constructed in Chicago in the 1960s, 90 percent were within one mile of the lake.
By the end of that decade, most of the opportunities closest to Lake Michigan had been seized, and the process of urban revival began moving into the blocks a little farther west that were known as Lincoln Park. Despite its location, the Lincoln Park neighborhood was more than a little seedy in the 1960s, with many of its 1920s-era apartment buildings turned into multitenant rooming houses. But Lincoln Park was the next closest thing to Lake Shore Drive, and by the early 1970s, its renewal was on the verge of completion. The invasion of the professional class now stretched all the way to Halsted Street, ten blocks from the lakefront park. There it stopped. Lakefront and Lincoln Park parents warned their children not to wander any farther west than Halsted Street. Halsted was the eastern boundary of the ominous residential enclave known as Sheffield.
If riding a bicycle west of Halsted Street was a scary enterprise, then renovating a house in Sheffield was a much riskier one. Nevertheless, people with the means to do that began doing it in the early 1970s. Sheffield was different from Lincoln Park in an important way: Rather than apartment buildings, its residential stock consisted largely of single-family homes—“workmen’s cottages,” in the local parlance. The neighborhood traditionally had housed German and Irish families whose breadwinners earned modest but stable livings serving as police officers or firefighters, or working for the local gas company, or holding down jobs at the nearby steel factory or the Deering Harvester plant in the industrial corridor just west of the neighborhood boundary.
Although no precise numbers exist, it’s estimated that workmen’s cottages comprised nearly two-thirds of all the housing in Sheffield at the start of the 1970s. They were modest in size, but they were solidly built and attractive—a quirkily eclectic mixture of Italianate, Romanesque, and Queen Anne architectural styles, nearly all dating from the period between 1880 and 1910. Hundreds of them were available, because their previous working-class owners had begun moving to the suburbs. They were also affordable; in tract 711, the more expensive of the two main Sheffield census tracts, the median home value in 1970 was $23,800. “Living west of Halsted was considered very risky,” says Diane Levin, a longtime resident. “But it was a beautiful, undeveloped neighborhood.”
It was also a neighborhood that was easy to get to. Trains on the Brown Line, then known simply as the Ravenswood El, rumbled by every few minutes. The Armitage Station, which opened in 1907, was rickety and underused in the early 1970s: It looked like a relic of a very different time. There were no wooden trains anymore—the Chicago Transit Authority had stopped using those in the 1950s—but the tracks and platforms and railings still conjured up the feeling of an old wooden city, and the tiny stations and creaking trains made the Ravenswood El feel a bit like the Toonerville Trolley of urban mass transit.
The Ravenswood line was in financial trouble throughout the 1970s, and the CTA threatened seriously to close it down in the early 1980s, but suddenly its ridership began to grow again, its mere presence an attraction to the arriving professionals more than it had been to the locally rooted blue-collar workers in the neighborhoods it traversed. Between 1987 and 1998, as overall CTA rail traffic continued to plummet, traffic on the newly renamed Brown Line increased by nearly 30 percent. In 2000, weekend service was reinstated along the line, forty-eight years after it had been discontinued for lack of patronage. By that time, roughly half of Sheffield’s workforce was taking the Brown Line to jobs somewhere in the city, and the main problem was overcrowding. All its stations had to be retrofitted to accommodate the longer trains that were necessary to handle the traffic. In the first decade of the new century, the Brown Line corridor was the hot property of Chicago’s transportation network, and Sheffield sat right in the middle of it.
The stations along the line are spaced every few blocks, and Sheffield has two of them: one at the south border on Armitage and one at the northern end at Fullerton, in the middle of the DePaul University campus.
Founded in 1898 by the Vincentian Catholic order, DePaul has always been a presence in the neighborhood—many of the priests who taught there grew up in working-class families on the Sheffield streets. But for most of the school’s history, it was a modest presence: “the little school under the El,” as people liked to call it, overshadowed in local Catholic education by the more imposing Loyola University
on the Far North Side. DePaul in 1970 was still almost entirely a commuter school, just as it had been in the 1920s and 1930s, when Richard J. Daley rode the train there four nights a week to get a law degree.
DePaul almost decided to abandon the Sheffield campus in 1967 for more enticing suburban pastures, but it made the opposite decision instead: It stayed and converted its grimy buildings dating from the 1920s into a modern and nationally known school whose twenty-four thousand students made it the largest Catholic college in the United States. It’s a stretch to call twenty-first-century Sheffield a college neighborhood, but the continued presence and growing reputation of the university was one more magnet enticing newcomers to buy the old workmen’s cottages that surrounded it on every side.
One other feature of Sheffield attracted newcomers in the 1970s and 1980s: its music scene. Music and theater had come to Lincoln Park in the 1950s, with the arrival of the Second City comedy club and a thriving folk and blues cluster in Old Town, a mile or so south of Sheffield along North Avenue and Wells Street. The glory days of Chicago folk music were over by the 1970s, but the blues began creeping northward, into storefronts on Halsted near Sheffield’s eastern border, close to DePaul. Some of them are still there: One of the clubs, B.L.U.E.S., is a reminder of the neighborhood’s funkier days, with a tiny stage, wobbly bar stools, and vinyl seats held together by duct tape. Across the street from B.L.U.E.S. is Kingston Mines, which dates all the way back to the late 1960s, a cavernous open space with stages built to look like back porches. These days, you can buy a genuine Kingston Mines jacket for $250. And there is one last conspicuous reminder of the folk scene: the Old Town School of Folk Music, located not in Old Town but along the Armitage shopping corridor between Halsted and Sheffield. It has been mainly a school and music store for several decades, holding on at the same address since 1968.
No one would confuse this with Montmartre in the 1890s, but it was an important part of Sheffield’s revival, an amenity that helped to persuade young and relatively affluent home buyers that the neighborhood was worth the indignities that still lingered from the days of overstuffed rooming houses and gangs and drugs on the street. It was a deal that the newcomers were willing to accept; the squalid days are now no more than a distant memory for those Sheffield residents who remember them at all.
THESE DAYS, Sheffield is much more concerned about preservation than it is about attracting development. The commercial corridors of Armitage Avenue and part of Halsted Street have been designated by the city as a historic district, and are unlikely to change very much. The blocks of storefronts that give the neighborhood the aura of the late nineteenth century seem poised to maintain it well into the twenty-first. On Webster Avenue, in the middle of Sheffield, you can find a jewelry store that calls itself the Left Bank and has done just about everything it can to create the aura of old-fashioned Parisian shopping. But with a few minor exceptions, the residential streets do not have historic protection. Plans to establish it have been debated for years, but have met a wall of resistance from home owners who don’t want to lose the right to alter their property as they see fit. Walking down the residential blocks of Sheffield, you find a smattering of lawn signs that read SAY NO TO LANDMARK DISTRICTS.
And so it is legal to do almost anything to a house on a residential block in Sheffield—add on to it, change its architectural style—or, most ominously, tear it down. There are some residents who insist that the neighborhood hasn’t changed much in the past few years, but others feel that it has been losing its identity to the teardowns of the last decade. “They’re turning what was a vibrant urban neighborhood into a collection of bloated, physically isolated, suburban-style manses,” Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin wrote a few years ago, referring specifically to the streets south of Armitage. “Most cities would kill to have billionaires and multi-millionaires putting down this kind of change instead of fleeing to the ’burbs.… It’s just that they’re killing off the architectural style and urban substance that once made this area so attractive.”
Sheffield combines “workmen’s cottages” from the nineteenth century and expensive new homes on narrow lots, built to replace older homes that have been torn down. (photo credit 2.2)
To an outsider, it doesn’t look that way. The vertical McMansions built in the last few years stand mostly as conspicuous exceptions to the long rows of Victorian cottages. They are conspicuous mainly because there are still relatively few of them. But there is no denying that the biggest story in Sheffield, at least until the real estate bust of 2008, was the arrival of the superrich.
Some of them are famous. Kerry Wood, the onetime star pitcher for the Cubs, became a resident of the neighborhood. So did Penny Pritzker, the Hyatt heiress identified by Forbes magazine in 2009 as the 647th-richest person in America, who built a home of more than eight thousand square feet on Orchard Street, just south of Armitage, a street that some locals have taken to calling “Gazillionaire’s Row.”
The McMansions in and around Sheffield don’t look anything like their suburban counterparts. The limits on height and lot size guarantee that. A majority of them are simply tall, narrow glass boxes. Some manage to blend in rather well with the surrounding buildings. But their extravagance is undeniable, even if not all of it is visible to the passerby. Many of them have elaborate green-designed rooftop decks on the fourth floor, reachable by elevator. Some of these decks block the view from the surrounding older houses. Some of the new houses have huge wine cellars that run the entire width of the property. There are heating coils under the sidewalks in front. And there are massive curb cuts that critics say ruin the pedestrian flavor of the streets on which they are placed.
The owners of the smaller houses that still dominate the neighborhood can’t really be said to have suffered economically. They bought for next to nothing, in many cases have paid off the mortgages, and could sell them for a fortune. The one depressing fact of life for the owner of a Sheffield cottage is taxes. Some home owners whose buildings fall far short of McMansion status find themselves looking at property tax bills that can run as high as $11,000 a year.
The most common complaint that long-term Sheffield residents make about the newcomers, however, is that they don’t have much interest in broader community life. There’s been “a tremendous diminution in participation in civic affairs,” says Martin Oberman, who used to represent Sheffield on the Chicago City Council. “There’s a lot more isolation. As people build three- or four-million-dollar houses, they tend not to be community activists.”
One hears that all the time in Sheffield. “The young people here don’t have kids for my littlest boy to play with,” one resident told a writer for Midwest Magazine. “They lead their own lives and don’t make friends.” But it’s not a new complaint. That comment was made in 1972. In Sheffield, as in countless neighborhoods around the country, the glory days of civic activism always seem to have occurred a generation before.
If there is a true test of resident commitment to the community, it would seem to be in the schools. The elementary school that serves Sheffield is Oscar Mayer, at the northern end of the neighborhood, next to the DePaul campus. It goes from kindergarten to eighth grade. For most of the past quarter century, the student body at Mayer was overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, with most of the pupils bused in from other parts of the city. There weren’t enough children from Sheffield families to keep it operating at capacity. In 2002, Mayer had a white student population of 12.5 percent.
In the past decade, that began to change. By 2007, the school was 27 percent white. It was in the process of conversion to magnet status, as a Montessori school in the lower grades and an International Baccalaureate program in the higher grades, with neighborhood residents guaranteed a place. This move generated criticism that the Chicago school system was mainly trying to make Mayer more attractive to affluent white families living around it, luring them away from private schools. That has been borne out only in a selective way. There are whit
e majorities in kindergarten and first grade, and sizable numbers of white pupils through the early primary school years. But as the children grow older, the percentages change. In eighth grade, Mayer remains a minority-dominated school.
The consensus nevertheless exists among some Sheffield residents that even though it is available to students of any race living anywhere in the city, Mayer in ten years will be a majority-white school primarily serving Sheffield and the neighborhoods around it. And whether we wish to believe it or not, school performance tracks demographics more than it tracks pedagogical approach. The more middle-class students populate a school, whatever their ethnic background happens to be, the higher the test scores rise. An increase in middle-class students is a magnet that draws more middle-class families to the neighborhood, changing the performance of the school further, in what amounts to a virtuous cycle.
IT’S EARLY EVENING now in Sheffield, the busiest time of day on Armitage Avenue. Sipping a glass of wine at the Twisted Lizard sidewalk café, around the corner from the train, you can track the changes in the street scene as the evening rush hour wears on. At five o’clock, the sidewalks transport a parade of babies in strollers, many of them just retrieved from the St. Vincent de Paul day-care center on Halsted Street, one of the largest such centers in the state, with nearly five hundred children in attendance. Judging from the profusion of strollers in the late afternoon, and the seemingly ubiquitous presence of children’s clothing stores on Armitage and Halsted, you begin to suspect that census data on household size in Sheffield—a median of roughly two people per household in the two main census tracts—is somehow in error.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 6