by Ed Zotti
On the whole, though, signs that the neighborhood was improving outnumbered those that it was getting worse. Purely from the standpoint of appearances the area had improved to a startling degree. The proximate cause of the change was the city’s decision to raze more than eighteen thousand units of public housing, including virtually all the projects in North Kenwood/Oakland. In 1994, not long after writing about James and Diane, I’d gone to one such project a few blocks from their house to do an interview for another story. As was often the case in Chicago, the building was one of a mass of public housing developments built side by side, stretching along Pershing Road for half a mile. Most of the buildings were low and barracks-like—these were the Ida B. Wells Homes. At the end of the long rank stood four grim high-rises, Darrow Homes, in one of which the housing authority had established a satellite office, my destination. As I approached from the parking lot I noticed many windows in the four towers were boarded up with plywood, some with scorch marks on the bricks above. None of the high-rises had handles on the exterior doors—to enter, you had to knock and wait till a security guard admitted you. Once inside you passed through a dim hallway where silent figures watched out the windows. The offices upstairs were cheerful enough, but suspended in front of the windows were enormous sheets of half-inch Plexiglas, meant to shield the occupants from flying glass or worse should violence erupt outside, which I gathered it frequently did.
It seemed obvious on first sight that the housing authority couldn’t continue like this, an impression that a review of its records and reports only deepened. Huge numbers of the dwellings under its nominal control were vacant and uninhabitable; repairing them would cost more than a billion dollars. The likelihood of obtaining that kind of money to restore the status quo was nil. It was time, I wrote, for the CHA to prepare for the inevitable downsizing to come. Pretty much everyone else felt the same way. A plan to replace most family public housing in Chicago with mixed-income developments was announced in 1999, and soon thereafter the first public-housing high-rises were razed.111
The housing market in North Kenwood/Oakland, long moribund, had been slowly coming to life in the 1990s, but once public housing began coming down, the process visibly accelerated. James spent the better part of the day driving me around the neighborhood to show me how much had been done. We began at the former public-housing site on Pershing Road. Power shovels were methodically demolishing what remained of the Ida B. Wells Homes. Darrow Homes was long gone, replaced by two- and three-story town houses and apartments laid out on a conventional street grid and comparable in appearance to what you’d see on the north side. Many of the homes were occupied; many others were still under construction. Piles of sewer pipe were spaced out at intervals across the newly cleared prairie where streets were to be built—the original streets had been ripped out decades earlier to create “superblocks” for public housing, a once-fashionable idea that had fallen into disfavor. But the city wasn’t now trying to create some facsimile of suburbia. Rather, the neighborhood was being reconstructed roughly along the lines it had had when first built.
Notable though this sprawling construction project was, it had been set in motion by public money. More remarkable, I thought, was the frenetic building activity on the nearby streets—the neighborhood was in the midst of a housing boom, most of it privately financed. Next door to James and Diane’s house there had once been an empty lot; now there was a newly completed four-story condo building—a large sign in front boasted of granite countertops and marble master baths with heated floors. Looking out their back porch thirteen years earlier I’d been able to see all the way to Drexel Boulevard, where the El Rukn temple had once stood. Now the view was blocked by a three-story condo building across the alley. Plans were afoot for a residential project to fill the larger of the remaining vacant lots on the street. James had paid $22,000 for his house in 1979; I asked what he thought it was worth now. He guessed $700,000.
The sweep of the work was astonishing—there was new construction on almost every block south of Oakwood Boulevard. I don’t know how many condos were newly completed, under construction, or promised with billboards on the street corners, but the number was surely in the thousands. On blocks where most of the older structures had survived, new infill housing stood on once-vacant lots. Other blocks had been almost entirely rebuilt. In most cases an attempt had been made to replicate the general features of the original buildings in the neighborhood. Though a few buildings were as ugly as anything you’d find on the north side, on the whole the quality of design was high and the construction substantial.
James, to hear him talk, wasn’t entirely happy about the changes in the neighborhood—his chief gripe was that some of the new housing wasn’t sufficiently upscale for his taste. He pointed out a few modestly scaled subsidized housing developments salted in among the more extravagant homes. Other buildings had stylish brick façades facing the street but vinyl siding everywhere else. (Recalling my sister’s house, I assured him this sort of thing wasn’t unheard of among white folks.) James had been restoring a house not far from his home; now he’d gotten wind of a plan by the city to buy up the block and allow a developer to put up high-rises—the property offered unobstructed views of the lake.
Eventually we crossed 47th Street into the portion of Kenwood that had been under the protection of the University of Chicago. The day was sunny, and the trees and other plantings were unusually lush due to abundant summer rain, and that plus James’s evident satisfaction and my own modest expectations may have prejudiced me—perhaps I shouldn’t have been as dazzled as I was. But I think anyone would have been impressed.
Those on the north side of Chicago have the idea they reside in the plush part of town, and it’s true you can find pockets of mansions and such; recent years, moreover, have seen the erection of numerous upscale apartment buildings, town houses, and single-family homes equipped with eurostyle cabinets, stainless steel appliances, and that kind of thing, and persons surrounded by such luxe appointments may conclude they’re living pretty large. The fact remains that the north side as initially built had been the abode mostly of the middle and working classes, and even today consists in the main of apartments and houses of economical design on unpretentious streets.
The south lakefront, in contrast, had been built for the rich. Virtually the entire area east of State Street between the Loop and Hyde Park had been, at one point or another, and omitting the usual institutional, commercial, and (in later days) industrial uses, a dense stand of luxury housing in an era when luxury meant something. The most prestigious streets—Drexel Boulevard, Michigan Avenue, King Drive, and others—had been conceived of as pleasure drives with wide parkways lined with trees, walkways, and planting beds. The houses themselves were eye-poppingly ornate, the majority of them graystones, which in Chicago was the term for a multistory masonry home with a limestone façade, often of elaborate design. In the twentieth century arson, abandonment, vandalism, urban renewal, and other plagues had taken an appalling toll on the south side, but Kenwood south of 47th Street had had relatively few demolitions. Now it had been restored.
We drove around for quite a while; James knew the area well. On street after street we saw meticulously maintained mansions, row houses, and apartment blocks—for sheer breadth of opulence the north side had nothing to compare. James pointed out the mansion where Louis Farrakhan lived, another formerly owned by Muhammad Ali. Senator Barack Obama lives in the community; the headquarters of Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH is located in a former synagogue at 50th street and Drexel Boulevard. Later I would look up the census numbers—the neighborhood, which is 70 percent African-American, has a median home price of close to $350,000, compared to $300,000 in our north-side community. The gentrified portion of Kenwood, in short, is wealthy and predominantly black. Few inner-city neighborhoods can be so described.
We continued into Hyde Park, which for fifty years has been Chicago’s only stable, substantially integrated neighbo
rhood (it’s 40 percent black). It too was now mostly gentrified.112 We stopped for a few minutes at Robie House, the celebrated Frank Lloyd Wright- designed mansion on the University of Chicago campus, now largely restored. I asked James what he thought about what he and Diane had gone through. “It’s not something the average person can endure,” he said. “You have to be a little bit crazy to do what we did. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Would I do it again? No.” Still, he thought, “growing up in the country”—he’d been raised in Arkansas—“coming to the city, looking at the architecture . . . it inspired me. This is the fulfillment of a dream.”
I was curious to see what kind of people were moving into the new homes on the south lakefront, so a few weeks after my tour with James I went to see Kendall, a fellow parent at FXW School whom I’d worked with on the annual fund-raiser. She’d recently moved with her family into a condo two blocks from James and Diane’s house. On her street as elsewhere in North Kenwood/ Oakland the signs of old and new were incongruously juxtaposed. The air was filled with the sound of hammering and heavy equipment; down the street a power shovel was digging up an old foundation. A sign on the corner offered directions to the sales office for a new condo development. Directly across from Kendall’s condo, on the other hand, was an empty courtyard apartment building with boarded-up windows surrounded by a chain-link fence. Orange stickers on the gate read NOTICE OF WATER SERVICE TERMINATION for nonpayment of $42,000. They were dated six weeks before.
Kendall, I learned, had grown up in a high-rise on Riverside Drive in Manhattan—David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, had lived across the hall. She’d gone to prep school (Horace Mann, of which I confess I knew little before she mentioned it, but I gather is quite the place) and graduated from Princeton University, where she’d met her husband, Chris, a New Jersey native who was the son of a nurse and one of the first black neurologists in the country. She’d never been to Chicago before flying out for a job interview with Leo Burnett, the advertising agency. “I fell in love with the city instantaneously,” she said. “You get the big-city experience but at the same time you have beaches. I thought, this is as good as it gets.” She got the Burnett job but left after a year to become director of development for a not-for-profit agency founded by Chicagoan John Rogers, Jr., another Princeton grad who had founded Ariel Capital Management, the largest black-owned investment firm in the United States, with $16 billion under management. There she worked with Arne Duncan, who would go on to become chief executive officer of the Chicago public school system. Years later they established a charter school in North Kenwood, Ariel Community Academy; one of the people they interviewed to become principal of this school was Mary Ellen Caron, the principal of FXW. Although Mary Ellen didn’t take the job, six years after she left FXW and became commissioner of the city’s Department of Children & Youth Services, she hired Chris, a lawyer, to become executive director of her department’s newly established Juvenile Intervention Center, which provided services for youth at risk of becoming part of the juvenile justice system.
I go into all this detail to make three points. First, Kendall was a city person; second, she was a member in good standing of the city-guy mafia—hell, she made me feel like a hermit; and third, she didn’t have to live in North Kenwood if she didn’t want to, yet here she was. She offered numerous reasons why the community was a smart place to invest, all of which at a certain level of abstraction made sense: the community was close to the lake—indeed, a new beach at 40th Street and other lakefront recreational facilities were then under construction; it was convenient to the Loop and transportation; the upside potential, as the real estate people say, was terrific. With most of the high-rise public housing gone, property values were spiraling upward; two $1.7 million homes were nearing completion down the block. The fact remained—and I hate to belabor the point, but come on—she, her husband, and their three small children were living a short walk from the spot where five years before two men had been beaten to death with rocks.
I asked Kendall about that. “I couldn’t have done this even three years ago,” she said. “But it’s a different world now. I could see all the building going on. At the end of the day I have kids and I’m not going to put them at risk, but I’m comfortable enough about the direction of the neighborhood to think they’ll be safe.
“I think this is an exciting experiment, for lack of a better term, in what this city can do. Chicago is so segregated.113 I went to prep school my entire life—I got tired of being one of the only African-Americans. I want to be around a great mix of people, and I think there will be more of that here than on the north side. Our neighbors are predominantly African-American, but I’m seeing more Caucasians and other races moving in. My hope is that it will be more like Hyde Park.”
I mentioned a book I’d read about North Kenwood/Oakland pointing out that the improvements in the neighborhood didn’t benefit all residents equally.114 The book said schools like Ariel Community Academy mainly served the middle class, which was better equipped to negotiate the complex admissions process; students from poor families generally had to make do with the older schools, which were among the worst in the city. The Chicago Housing Authority had promised the residents of public housing projects in North Kenwood/Oakland slated for demolition that they’d have first claim on replacement housing, but a federal judge had thrown out the agreement. While fears that white people would take over the community seemed overblown, it wasn’t so hard to believe that affluent black people might supplant a lot of the poor ones.
“I struggle with that,” Kendall said. “I don’t see enough disadvantaged and well-off African-Americans mixing—there’s little common ground. Socioeconomic status divides way more than race ever will. Some African-Americans don’t want to be around people with the same skin color as theirs just because they don’t have the same income or they don’t speak as well. Some people don’t have a problem with that. I do. I don’t want it to be all wealthy African-Americans. To me being successful is being able to deal with all kinds of people in all situations. You want a balance, but at the same time you don’t want to displace people. I don’t know how you solve that problem.
“For Christopher and me social justice is very important. We believe we were called to do what we do. We African-Americans who have more advantages tend to look out for ourselves and don’t give back as much as we should. That’s a big part of why our people as a whole are in the state that we are. Some of our African-American neighbors make a lot of money, and I want my kids to see that. But I also want them to see a socioeconomic and racial mix. I want my kids to be citified—when I take them to the play-ground I want them to see all kinds of people and hear all kinds of languages. The richness of having grown up in a major city is irreplaceable.”
I knew what she meant. For city people, diversity wasn’t something you put up with; it was an essential part of the draw. You got to see the whole human circus. Sure, in the suburbs you might have better luck finding a parking spot. But in the city you felt more alive.
There are other arguments to be made for cities, I realize. We stand at the brink of an age in which resources will become increasingly scarce, and some believe dense older towns are better adapted to the coming economic realities than newer ones built around the automobile. That may be so, although the analysis is more complicated than might be supposed (I won’t get into it now), and in any case few make lifestyle choices based on altruism. The argument for me was simpler: I found the city offered a more satisfying life. Others, I knew, had contrary opinions and were welcome to them. The main thing was, now you had a choice.
There was another attraction to urban living as well, one that was peculiar to a gentrifying as opposed to a gentrified town, and I think any city person who has had the experience will own up to it—the sense of participating in a grand adventure. Many of us who had lived a long time in Chicago felt it with particular acuteness—we’d seen a mature city emerge during our lifetimes, and perh
aps felt we had contributed ourselves in some small way. There was something noble about it, I think. Here was one of the great human projects, in which generations long forgotten had invested their lives, for a time seemingly destined for the scrap heap. We had restored it to the main current of history. How much longer our little piece of it would endure was impossible to say, but craftsmanship had gotten Mrs. Carr’s house this far; perhaps our modest contribution would get it a little further.
Granted, the larger job was far from complete. Many who followed us in Chicago would try to salvage neighborhoods in worse shape than the ones we called home. In one important respect, though—and you’ll forgive me if I boast in saying so—they’d have an advantage an earlier generation didn’t. They wouldn’t have merely the idea of the city before them; they’d have the thing itself.
Epilogue
The Barn House was one of the last home renovation projects Tony and Jerry worked on. Reasoning that there had to be an easier way to make money, they began bidding on commercial jobs, and eventually found a profitable niche rehabilitating hotels and motels—a business that lent itself to production-line economies, since once you’d figured out an efficient way to renovate the first room, you merely repeated the process for every room thereafter. They moved their office to the suburbs and Jerry relocated to Florida. Eddie remained in Chicago, and I hired him for several additional projects at the Barn House—among other things, his guys rebuilt in cedar the porch steps I’d been foolish enough to have made out of pine initially. As always the work was exquisite.