by Adam Cohen
Although Daley and the Loop businessmen had succeeded in defeating yet another alternative site, they were still not able to secure the railroad site that was their first choice. The railroad companies were now asking for $140 million for the land and for a new terminal, far more than Daley was prepared to pay. And Daley and the companies could not reach an agreement on a consolidated railroad terminal. With negotiations over the railroad site at an impasse, another possibility emerged: a fifty-five-acre urban renewal site in the Near West Side Harrison-Halsted neighborhood. The Harrison-Halsted site was a few blocks west of the Loop, and just south of the Congress Expressway. It was close enough to serve as the kind of “anchor” for the Loop that downtown business leaders were looking for. And it would also serve as a racial barrier — not between the Loop and the South Side ghetto, but between the Loop and another nearby concentration of poor blacks. The Harrison-Halsted site was just a few blocks east of one of the largest concentrations of public housing in the city — the 1,027 units of the Jane Addams Houses, the forty buildings and 1,200 units of the Grace Abbott Homes, and the 834 units of the Robert Brooks Homes. These projects, originally built for white occupancy, were already well on their way to becoming overwhelmingly black. And the neighborhood in which they were located was, according to one contemporaneous account, “probably the most depressed area in the City.” The Harrison-Halsted site was already owned by the city, so it could be delivered to the university quickly. An added advantage was that, since it was a designated urban redevelopment site, much of the cost of acquiring the land could be charged to the federal government under the Urban Renewal Act. 22
Daley formally proposed the Harrison-Halsted site to the university trustees at a September 27, 1960, meeting. It was, he said, the option that would “get the University into Chicago as fast as possible.” As it happened, the Garfield Park site was on a slower track because a Cook County Circuit Court judge who owed his seat on the bench to the Democratic machine had recently struck down as unconstitutional the new state law approving the transfer of Garfield Park park land to the university. That decision would later be reversed by the Illinois Supreme Court, but it succeeded in casting doubt over the Garfield Park site at a crucial point. Daley’s first choice, the railroad site, was still out of reach, since the railroads showed no signs of coming to terms with the city on transfer of the land. But he had orchestrated the process in a way that made the selection of his other choice, Harrison-Halsted, increasingly inevitable. Daley’s presentation to the trustees was well received, and they voted in favor of the Harrison-Halsted campus. 23
The Harrison-Halsted community, unlike Garfield Park, was bitterly opposed to having a University of Illinois campus built in their midst. Where Garfield Park residents had seen the school as a lifeline, Harrison-Halsted residents saw it as a bulldozer that would raze block after block of their vibrant neighborhood. Harrison-Halsted was an old-fashioned, working-class urban community. It was part of the heavily Italian 1st Ward, which sent the syndicate’s favorite alderman, John D’Arco, to the City Council. But the neighborhood was an ethnic mix, including Italians, Greeks, blacks, and Mexicans. Harrison-Halsted was also home to Hull House, the famous settlement house that Jane Addams established in 1889 to serve Chicago’s poor. Plans for the new campus would require Hull House to be moved or destroyed. Also threatened was the Holy Guardian Angel Church and its adjoining parochial school, beloved neighborhood institutions that had just relocated in 1959 when their original building was demolished to build the Dan Ryan Expressway. 24
A grassroots movement, largely made up of neighborhood women, formed to save Harrison-Halsted from the bulldozers. A housewife named Florence Scala, who had been active on the New West Side Planning Board, showed up at a February 13, 1961, meeting at Holy Guardian Angel out of curiosity, and was reluctantly drafted to lead the cause. A week later, she presided over a meeting of more than five hundred neighborhood residents at Hull House. Since the local elected officials had decided to sell out the community to Daley and the machine, the residents decided, they would have to take matters into their own hands. A new organization, the Harrison-Halsted Community Group, was formed, and Scala became its leader. The group took their battle for their homes and neighborhood to any political body that would hear them out. The University of Illinois Board of Trustees, the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency, the state legislature, the Illinois Housing Board, the Planning and Housing Committee of the City Council, and the full City Council all turned down Scala and her followers and endorsed the Harrison-Halsted site. They also appealed to elected officials for help, but Senator Paul Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, and Bill Dawson all refused to take the community’s side against Daley. 25
Turned down by the power structure, neighborhood residents moved on to direct action. On March 20, one thousand supporters of the Harrison-Halsted Community Group followed Scala on a march from Saint Francis of Assisi Church to Hull House to appeal for their neighborhood to be spared. The demonstrators, most of them women from the area, held signs with messages like “Daley Is a Dictator — He Won’t Get Any More Democratic Votes from Us.” As the City Council’s vote on the proposed site drew near, someone tossed a dummy into the street outside Daley’s home. It included a mark that looked like a bullet hole, and a sign that read: “This is Mayor Daley of the future.” But Daley was not deterred. “No one is going to threaten me as mayor of Chicago,” he said. “If I had been there, I would have taken care of them. ...I don’t fear death either.” Daley loudly proclaimed that he would “tak[e] care of the situation” himself, and quietly doubled the police guard outside his home. 26
When the time came for the City Council to vote, Daley appeared personally to speak in support of a bill to designate 155 acres of Harrison-Halsted as the site of the new campus. It was “unfortunate that in the selection of sites for public improvement some must suffer,” Daley told a standing-room-only crowd of four hundred. But he insisted that the debate over the location had overshadowed “the most important issue, that is to give the young people of Chicago and Cook County an accessible university.” Daley invoked the spirit of Jane Addams — whose Hull House was being threatened by bulldozers — and promised that the campus’s new School of Social Work would be named for her. It was Alderman D’Arco, however, who won cheers from the crowd when he protested that the Harrison-Halsted site had been “picked in desperation and was the choice of no one.” The City Council followed Daley’s lead and voted in favor of the site. 27
When the voting was over, two hundred members of the Harrison-Halsted Community Group marched to Daley’s office. When they got inside, they pounded on desks, threw things, and railed bitterly against Daley and the City Council. “The rich always take away from the poor!” one woman shouted. Another threatened, “The first surveyor is going to get it in the head with a crowbar; putting us out on the streets. What do you think we are, animals?” Daley, refusing to confront a group made up largely of mothers fighting to protect their homes, slipped out a side door and left them to his director of special events. The demonstrators agreed to leave after they were promised a meeting with Daley the next day. At that meeting, Daley explained that the responsibility for selecting Harrison-Halsted lay with the university trustees — the same group Daley had spent years talking out of the suburban and Garfield Park sites that they preferred. “This has been misrepresented and twisted as though the city had selected the site,” Daley told the women. 28
Plans for construction were proceeding rapidly. Daley’s urban renewal commissioner announced that the city had been awarded $26.2 million in federal funds to acquire and clear 105.8 acres for the campus. Groundbreaking for the first of thirteen new buildings was scheduled for the fall. Scala announced that the Harrison-Halsted Community Group was filing federal and state lawsuits to block construction, and on August 15, 1962, the group appealed to Daley to stop further condemnation of their neighborhood until their appeals were ruled on. But Daley would not be deterred
. “I never heard him second-guess himself,” said his son William. “You make a decision, you don’t second-guess yourself or look back. He did not wring his hands.” 29
The Harrison-Halsted Community Group continued its protests, but defeat seemed increasingly inevitable. One day in October, Scala and some of her followers confronted Daley at a sit-in in his office, and made another appeal for residents to be allowed to stay in their homes until their legal appeals could be ruled on. “What is going to happen to these people?” Scala asked of her neighbors. But to Daley, it all came down to politics. “Why don’t you take care of your candidate?” he asked Scala, implying that Richard Ogilvie, the Republican candidate for Cook County sheriff, was behind the protests. “You can’t even talk to the man,” Scala said afterward. “You start to ask him a question and he keeps talking.” The following day, Daley announced that the families who lived in the area where the first construction was to occur would have to move out immediately, before their appeals were exhausted. The other residents could remain through the appeal process. The impact of the evictions on neighborhood residents was devastating. “I walked around with Florence Scala at the time when they were clearing people out,” says one reporter. “A lot of the people had lived in that neighborhood their whole lives, the old Italian people. A lot of them died — they just couldn’t make the move.” 30
In the end, Daley’s plans for the University of Illinois–Chicago destroyed two neighborhoods. The toll inflicted by the new campus was obvious in Harrison-Halsted, which lost as many as 14,000 residents and 630 businesses. But Garfield Park, which Daley deprived of the campus, was the second victim. The neighborhood’s decline, which was already under way, picked up speed after the decision was made to build the university elsewhere. Middle-class residents put their homes up for sale and, in the familiar cycle, poor blacks moved in. Within years, lower-middle-class Garfield Park had become one of Chicago’s worst slums. In 1965, West Garfield Park would become famous as the site of an unfortunate fatality caused by an outof-control fire truck, which prompted massive riots among the neighborhood’s alienated slum-dwellers. The seeds for that unrest were planted when Daley prevented the University of Illinois trustees from building the campus there. The Loop’s gain was, undeniably, Garfield Park’s loss. 31
The new University of Illinois campus had just the economic and racial impact on the Harrison-Halsted neighborhood that Loop business leaders had hoped for. Before the arrival of the campus, it was one of the few racially integrated neighborhoods in the city. In 1960, 3,500 blacks lived in the neighborhood, about 15 percent of the population. Some lived in the Jane Addams Houses, but many more did not. A decade later, after the campus was completed, the black population had fallen to 2,900. But the biggest change was that almost all of them now lived in the Jane Addams Houses census tracts. With the campus standing between Jane Addams and the Loop, virtually all of the blacks who lived in this neighborhood abutting the Loop were now separated from downtown by an enormous physical barrier. The neighborhood also underwent an economic transformation. From 1961 to 1965, the cost of land in the area doubled, and from 1965 to 1971 it doubled again. The result of siting the campus in Harrison-Halsted was that a neighborhood that was once becoming more racially diverse was transformed into a far whiter “island of higher incomes and land values.” 32
The other large institution Daley had long hoped to bring to Chicago was a modern airport. The idea for a new Chicago airport dated back as early as 1944, when the Chicago Plan Commission called for the development of “an airport which will make Chicago the center of aviation.” The need for a world-class airport was undeniable. Chicago had, by the 1940s, established itself as the regional aviation hub for the entire Midwest. By the end of the decade, Chicago was the first city in the country to average more than one thousand plane movements a day, twice as many as New York City. Chicago Municipal Airport, now Midway Airport on the Southwest Side, would not be able to keep up with the city’s air traffic much longer. 33
Although the need was clear, efforts to get a new airport built continually stalled. In March 1946, the U.S. Air Force donated 1,080 acres of land and a small hangar to the city, which would have made an ideal site, but no one could agree on how to fund construction and operation of the airport itself. At the time, New York’s La Guardia Field was running deficits of $1 million a year, and Chicago’s airports had also been money-losers. Mayor Kelly tried to arrange a combination of federal and state funds and usage fees from the airline industry, but the airlines balked. They refused to switch flights over to the new airport if its fees were any greater than at Municipal. The City Council authorized the purchase of additional land, bringing the site up to 7,000 acres, but when Mayor Kelly left office the question of how to build and operate the airport remained at an impasse. The domestic airlines flying into the city organized themselves into a bargaining committee, called the Chicago Airlines Top Committee, composed of one executive from each airline. In March 1949, the airlines notified the city that they were interested in a new airport, but they did not say how much they would be willing to pay. Mayor Kennelly signed an ordinance on June 28, 1949, naming the proposed new airport O’Hare Field, after a World War II aviation hero. There was some limited construction on the O’Hare site in the early 1950s, but it was hamstrung by lack of financing. The federal Civil Aeronautics Board allocated $1.8 million, the state contributed $1.17 million, and the federal government came up with another $1.6 million for construction of an 8,000-foot runway. But the overall problem of financing O’Hare was far from settled, and until it was the airlines were refusing to shift any flights to it. 34
As soon as Daley became mayor in 1955, he began working to end the impasse over the funding of O’Hare. In his first weeks in office, he sent telegrams to top executives of each airline inviting them to meet with him in Chicago, bypassing the intransigent Chicago Airlines Top Committee. Daley had no trouble convincing them that air traffic at Midway was excessive, and that some of it would need to shift to O’Hare. The hard part was bringing the airlines around on finances, the subject that had tripped up previous mayors. Daley hammered away at the airlines, arguing that they were not doing their part. He “made us feel cheap about some of the things,” United Airlines president William Patterson said later. In the end, the airlines agreed to assume the cost of operating O’Hare, in a sixty-seven-page document that committed both sides for the next fifteen years. “It is the only contract of its kind,” Daley declared, “where a city has operations costs completely guaranteed on a major airport.” With financing firmly in place, an air show was held at O’Hare on October 29, 1955, to mark the airport’s official opening. It was, at 6,393 acres, the largest airfield in the nation, more than 1,000 acres larger than New York’s Idlewild Field, later renamed John F. Kennedy Airport. Regular commercial flights began the next day. 35
Despite his breakthroughs on financing and securing airline traffic, Daley’s work on O’Hare was far from done. The airport was located outside Chicago’s corporate limits. That meant that even though the city owned the land, technically it might not even be a Chicago airport. The city’s lawyers had advised Daley that, among other problems, there could be legal disputes over Chicago’s police powers on the site. Daley proposed in February 1956, to annex five miles of Route 72, also known as Higgins Road, to connect the airport to the city. The nearby suburbs opposed this “O’Hare Corridor,” and two of them announced their own plans for annexing parts of Higgins Road. Daley responded by inviting the suburban officials to a meeting in City Hall. If the suburbs agreed to his annexation plans, he told them, he would promise not to annex any additional land near the airport that could get in the way of their own plans to expand. “Chicago is not interested in interfering with plans of other communities in any way,” he assured them. The suburbs agreed to Daley’s terms, and two weeks later the Chicago City Council voted 48–0 to annex O’Hare Field and connect it to Chicago through Higgins Road. But it did not take lon
g for Daley to renege on his part of the bargain. In March, Schiller Park voted to annex part of a county forest preserve that lay between Chicago and the airport — precisely the land Daley promised not to interfere with. At Daley’s behest, the City Council voted to annex most of the remainder of the forest preserve for Chicago. 36
Even though O’Hare was now formally connected to Chicago, transportation between the airport and downtown remained a problem. There was no direct highway link, and some wags had taken to dubbing O’Hare “the only airport in the world accessible only by air.” The Northwest Expressway, later renamed the Kennedy, was supposed to provide a direct highway connection. It had been envisioned thirty-three years earlier in a report of the Chicago Plan Commission, but it had been bogged down in the same kind of delays as the airport it was supposed to connect to. Before Daley was elected mayor, a cash-strapped Cook County had agreed to hand over part of the expressway to the state’s toll highway system. When Daley took office, he immediately set out to reverse that decision. He was opposed, on principle, to charging a toll for the trip to the airport, but he also had other objections. Toll roads were barred by state law from including median strips for mass transportation, and they were ineligible for federal highway funds — and Daley wanted his expressway to have both. Daley worked out an agreement with the Toll Commission and the Cook County Board to make the expressway toll-free. By the time it was completed on November 5, 1960, federal funds paid for 90 percent of the road’s $300 million construction cost. 37 A decade later, as Daley had hoped, a rapid transit line was opened in the median strip.