Detroit was, after all, one of America’s top ten cities. It not only had a franchise in every major sport, it had pre-expansion franchises. WJR (“From the golden tower of the Fisher Building … the great voice of the Great Lakes”) broadcast its signal as far as the East Coast. Hudson’s department store was the first place I remember riding an elevator, a lift with a caged door. I heard Rush, Asia, the Band, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young in Detroit’s sports arenas and concert halls.
Chicago was only 225 miles to my southwest, but since it lay on the opposite shore of Lake Michigan, it may as well have been New Zealand. I first visited in March of 1988, during spring break from my senior year at Michigan State. The season was neither winter nor spring. It was too cold to be chilly and too warm to be cold. The days were too bright to be nights but too cloudy to look like anything but dusk. My friend Jim and I saw a Nelson Algren exhibit at the public library, but when we looked for the apartment where Algren had romanced Simone de Beauvoir, we discovered it had been demolished to provide airspace for a freeway. Chicago had destroyed its past, and in its present—at least in that postsnowfall, prebloom week—it seemed as gray, as inorganic, as a set from The Third Man or David Lynch’s bleak Eraserhead. Except for a change of trains in Union Station, I did not return for four years. One night, on a lark, Jim and I drove around Lake Michigan. As we rounded the bottom, we stopped in Chicago to see a high school friend who worked in a music store downtown. Jon Mark was our pioneer, the immigrant who moves to the big city and tells everyone back home the streets are … paved. In the early 1990s, most of my hometown friends began quitting their low-wage gigs at the restaurant or the book warehouse and moving to Chicago, in search of better-paying work. By the time I followed them, I had a friend who helped me find me an apartment (a $325 studio, the same rent I’d paid for a two-bedroom house in Decatur), a friend who helped me carry a couch up three flights of stairs during a heat wave (the heat wave of 1995, when more than five hundred elderly Chicagoans suffocated in their uncooled apartments), and a friend who got me a job (as a stringer for the Chicago Tribune).
THE CHICAGO to which I moved in 1995 was not the Chicago of 1980, the year Wisconsin Steel closed and the Chicago Tribune announced that the city was “being eaten away by economic forces as powerful as those that thrust it out of the marshes a century ago.” It was not even the Chicago I’d visited in 1988, a few months after the death of Mayor Harold Washington. That Chicago still hadn’t gotten over Council Wars—years of conflict between Washington and white aldermen, which reminded everyone that Chicago was the most segregated city in America, as impossible to govern as Yugoslavia.
Most Chicagoans lived on streets that were no more diverse than Ireland or Nigeria, but they at least lived in the same city. Unlike Detroit, white flight never transformed Chicago into a black metropolis. There were several reasons for this. Chicago is a Roman Catholic city with strong parish allegiances. Its parochial schools prepared the children for the University of Notre Dame as well as any suburban academy. Mayor Richard J. Daley enforced the law requiring police, firefighters, teachers, garbage collectors, and anyone else who drew a city paycheck to live within the city limits. It was essential to his political survival because those jobs had been granted in exchange for allegiance to the Democratic Machine. Unlike Michigan governor George Romney, who marched with King and championed open-housing laws, Daley was not a liberal on race. When King marched through an all-white neighborhood in Chicago, he was hit in the head with a rock. The neighborhood stayed all white. A pillar of Daley’s master plan for Chicago was to “reduce future losses of white families.” As long as those white families paid taxes and voted the Democratic ticket, Daley would try to keep the blacks out of their neighborhoods. When two black students tried to rent an apartment on Daley’s own block, he did nothing to stop the mob that protested their arrival. Instead, he arranged for the students’ lease to be canceled. Rather than allow pupils at overcrowded black schools to attend nearby white schools, he had them taught in trailers. Although the South and West Sides were “gone,” in the words of dispossessed whites, Daley’s policy of containment maintained ethnic enclaves on the city’s fringes. Racial redlining wasn’t an option for Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh. Unlike Daley, Cavanagh was ambitious for higher office and needed to maintain a progressive image. Cavanagh also didn’t control a political machine that could buy black votes with housing project apartments, post office jobs, and Election Day turkeys. He had to give his blacks police captains and fair-housing ordinances.
“What prevented Chicago from going the way of Cleveland and Buffalo?” wrote Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor in American Pharaoh, their biography of Daley. “Much of the credit lies with Daley’s aggressive program for downtown redevelopment.”
Old Man Daley combined the tribal suspicions of an Irish tavern keeper with the municipal ambition of a Roman consul. Inheriting a downtown in which no skyscrapers had been built since the beginning of the Depression, he left it with the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center.
Jane Byrne, who was elected mayor two-and-a-half years after Daley’s death, invited the movies back to Chicago. (Feeling burned by Medium Cool, a documentary-style film about the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Daley had mostly kept Hollywood out, because screenwriters were no better than the journalists at making Chicago look bad. Also, the blue language and nudity of 1970s cinema offended his Roman Catholic prudishness.) In the 1980s, The Blues Brothers, Risky Business, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off made Chicago look like a place where a kid from the suburbs could have a good time and colorized the city’s image, which had been stuck on Al Capone and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Another event that set up Chicago’s rebirth was the AIDS crisis. In the early 1980s, every young gay man wanted to move to New York or San Francisco. Then AIDS struck the saltwater coasts. A young South Sider named Tom Tunney decided he would be safer in Chicago and took a job in a hotel in Lake View, which was then a crummy neighborhood surrounding Wrigley Field. The 1980s were a low point for urban America, so gays were welcomed to the inner city. As one demographer after another has pointed out, gays attract creative types to a city by sending the message that it’s a tolerant place, open to new ideas and lifestyles. When straight Joe Lambert graduated from Michigan State, he headed directly to Lake View, where he joined thousands of other newly graduated Web developers, graphic designers, publicists, and personal banking representatives. By then, Tunney was Lake View’s alderman.
However, it was under Daley’s son, Richard M., that Chicago became a global city. During Old Man Daley’s reign in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, he never thought about Chicago’s relationship to the rest of the world. He didn’t have to. In those years, when America still made everything it needed, this country was Rome and imperial Britain rolled into one.
“There was no globalization at that time,” said Gery Chico, a Mexican-American lawyer who grew up near the Union Stock Yards and became Richard M. Daley’s chief of staff. (The stockyards, setting of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, closed in 1971, an early blow to blue-collar Chicago.) “Economies were largely siloed. There wasn’t the interconnectedness of trading, with its currencies, commodities, risk devices, you name it. That’s only really come about through means of technology, so when the technology revolution reached maturity in the eighties and nineties, that’s what drove globalization. The fastest-moving force on the face of the planet is global business.”
Chicago was well prepared for the day when trading something became more profitable than making something. To begin with, Chicago always had a more diversified economy than its Midwestern rivals. Besides forging steel and slaughtering cattle, Chicago published books, wrote insurance, traded grain futures, and issued bank loans. As the headquarters of the Mercantile Exchange and the Board of Trade, it was the Midwest’s financial hub. Because of the University of Chicago, it was home to more Nobel laureates than any city in the world. And because of Chicago’s geographic
position as the Roundhouse of America, O’Hare was the world’s busiest airport. That made it a convenient location for consulting businesses that flew employees all over the country. (The term “yuppie” was popularized by Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, who titled an article on Chicago Seven defendant Jerry Rubin “From Yippie to Yuppie.” In the 1990s, Chicago’s yuppie consultants invented the linguistic device of mixing the present and future tense in the same sentence. “I’m in Phoenix all next week,” they’d say.)
Professional services were Chicago’s new “product.” In 1986, the city’s ad agencies, investment banks, law firms, benefits consultants, accountants, and management consultants employed seventeen thousand people; a dozen years later, they employed sixty thousand. Boeing announced it was moving its corporate headquarters to the Loop in the same month that Brach’s closed its West Side candy factory, an emblematic moment in Chicago’s transformation from a city that made things to a city that thought about things.
As the mayor’s chief of staff, Chico visited Chicago’s sister cities around the world and welcomed their delegations to Chicago. Young Daley cared more than his father about the city’s image to outsiders. His patronage workers scrubbed graffiti off walls, tore down thousands of empty buildings, and towed abandoned cars. He planted pots of flowers on sidewalks and pedestrian overpasses, and surrounded parks with black wrought-iron fences. Nelson Algren would not have recognized the city he compared to a woman with a broken nose, nor would Carl Sandburg have seen a stormy, husky, brawling City of Big Shoulders, but Chicago had to stop looking like an industrial city before it could become an international city.
Chico, who became wealthy as a lobbyist after leaving city hall, moved into a million-dollar condo in the Metropolitan Tower, which had once housed the offices of Encyclopaedia Britannica. As a lawyer, he helped convert the Illinois Bell building to condominiums.
“When I was a kid working here in the late seventies, this town closed up at five,” he said. “I mean, there was nothing down here. Maybe a few movie theaters. But the streets were cleared and the place was empty. Today, I live downtown. Along with fifty-six thousand other people and a lot of executives who find it very convenient to be in the central area.”
Richard C. Longworth, the Tribune reporter who in 1980 had written, “There is no reason to think [Chicago] will ever turn around,” now began noticing changes in his downtown apartment building. When he’d moved in, only adults lived there. Then families began arriving. By the late 1990s, “you’d go to parties and hear anecdotal stories about this great school.”
But as Chicago transformed itself from a city of factories to a global financial nexus, its class structure was transformed in exactly the way globalization’s enemies in Decatur predicted.
“Many Chicagoans live better than ever,” Longworth wrote in Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism, his book on the modern Midwest,
… in safe housing in vibrant neighborhoods, surrounded by art and restaurants, with good public transport whisking them to exciting jobs in a dazzling city center that teems with visitors and workers from around the world. These are the global citizens, hardworking, well-educated, well-paid, well-traveled. And many Chicagoans live worse than ever in the old ghettos, or worse, are being shoved by gentrification out of the ghettos into destitute inner-ring suburbs. The old housing projects lying in the path of the Loop’s expansion are knocked down and their inhabitants scattered to the civic winds. These are the global have-nots, separated by class and education as much as by race from any of the benefits of a global economy. In the middle are the global servants, immigrants, mostly Mexican, who perform the services—valet parking, gardening, dishwashing, dog-walking, bussing in bistros, low-level construction—that the global citizens need.
All this, the rich and the poor, is on display in Chicago. Once a broadly middle-class city, where factory workers owned their homes and shared in the dream, Chicago today is a class-ridden place, with lots of people at the top and lots of people at the bottom and not that much in between.
In the late 1990s, Chicago had more murders than any American city, even more than New York or Los Angeles, whose Crack Wars had ended earlier in the decade. One of the old housing projects of which Longworth wrote was Cabrini-Green, the setting for the 1970s sitcom Good Times. As Cabrini-Green was dismantled to make way for the outriders of the bourgeois white invasion, an old black man made an astute observation on how his new neighbors’ pursuit of professional achievement had isolated them personally. “I’ve never seen so many dogs,” he said. (Common, the South Side hip-hop artist, had the same thing in mind when he rapped, “White folks focus on dogs and yoga.”) The Pacific Garden Mission left the Loop after the winos were driven out. Tunney, the gay alderman who had helped gentrify the neighborhood near Wrigley Field, predicted, “In twenty-five years, the entire city is going to look like this. It’s going to be Manhattanized. There’s nothing anybody can do about it. There’s too much demand for land in the city.”
The classic ladder of urban renewal goes like this: artists looking for cheap digs colonize a neighborhood on the edge of the ghetto/barrio/ abandoned industrial park. They are followed by homosexuals, who, because they cannot generate children, don’t mind the bad neighborhood schools and have enough disposable income to paint their houses. After the homosexuals come the twenty-four-year-old personal banking assistants, market research associates, and senior policy analysts. (You’ll know they’ve arrived when the courtyard apartment buildings are surrounded by black iron fences with security buzzers.) In the final phase, young marrieds decide not to raise their children in the same suburbs where they were raised. The young marrieds do mind the bad neighborhood schools, so they prepare the kids to test into an elite high school, which will lead to an elite college, which will lead to a job as a senior policy analyst and an apartment in a courtyard building with a black iron fence, thus shortening the next generation of gentrification by two steps.
I had mixed feelings about gentrification. On the one hand, I had grown up in Lansing in the 1970s and ’80s. In those decades, it seemed no one wanted to live in a city. All my parents’ friends moved to the suburbs, for bigger houses or whiter schools, and we never saw them again. Having been raised on the dichotomy that everything poor, dark, and dirty belonged in a city, while everything wealthy, white, and clean belonged in a suburb, I was glad to see rich people buying a stake in urban life. On the other hand, my second Chicago apartment was in a neighborhood in transition from Gentrification Phase 1 to Gentrification Phase 2. I paid $430 a month for a one-bedroom apartment with a steam heater that couldn’t warm a dinner roll, an oven that couldn’t warm anything, and a pet rat I discovered when it raced across the kitchen floor like the chuck wagon in the dog food commercial. A few blocks to my west was a neighborhood called Andersonville. Anderson-ville was a gay enclave, but its businesses were holdovers from the gay community’s underground era: a bathhouse, a leather emporium, a twink bar, a troll bar, an X-rated video store, a lesbian bookshop. Nonetheless, it is a real estate truism that homosexuals raise property values, no matter how much they’re into leather. A few blocks to my east was Argyle Street, a block of Vietnamese restaurants, run by immigrants. Andersonville won. My landlord sold to a development company that kicked out all the tenants on a month’s notice and transformed the building into luxury apartments. One of my neighbors was a retired elevator inspector who had lived in his apartment for thirty-five years—since John F. Kennedy was president. When we were dispossessed, in October, the new owners shut down the boiler, forcing old Mr. Wein-mann to heat the apartment with an open stove. It took him months to find a new home for himself, his wife, his daughter-in-law, and his two grandchildren. When I returned a year later, to see the display unit, The Best of Blondie was in the top rack of the CD holder. And if you visit Andersonville today, you’ll find a gym, custom furniture stores, fashion boutiques, a running-shoe store, and GQ’s best pizzeria. It’s a
t III, going on IV. Living near Andersonville made me economically homophobic. I have nothing against gays getting married, but I don’t want them driving up my rent.
EVEN SOUTH CHICAGO, neighborhood of abandoned steel mills, sees its future in attracting the professional class.
U.S. Steel South Works was finished in 1992, when the structural mill and the last electrical furnaces shut down. South Works had been built in 1880, on 73 acres of lakefront property. Gradually, the mill expanded atop its own excretions, piling slag into the shallows of Lake Michigan, until, like Holland reclaiming the sea, it had created a 573-acre peninsula of limestone dolomite and phosphorous. Once U.S. Steel departed, this promontory of slag became the largest undeveloped plot of lakefront property in Chicago. Unlike other Great Lakes industrial cities, Chicago had preserved its shoreline: A city mandate written in 1836 establishing Grant Park declared the lakefront should be “forever free and clear.” But the parks, marinas, and bathing beaches had ended at the gates of U.S. Steel, ten miles south of the Loop. Dismantling South Works meant Chicago could extend its greenbelt to the Calumet River. It also meant South Chicago had a chance to revive itself with the element that provided its original prosperity: water. In the late nineteenth century, water had been essential for floating in iron ore and floating out finished steel. By the late twentieth century, as Burnham had foreseen, water had become a lifestyle amenity. Those downtown Chicago condos came with lake views—something Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, or Gary could not provide.
However, no one wants to live on slag, no matter how close to the water. Children can’t play on slag. Grass won’t grow in slag. To cover the dead Plutonian surface, the city floated in 168 barges full of muck from the bottom of Peoria Lake, a wide spot in the Illinois River, 150 miles southwest of Chicago. Arriving in Lake Michigan via a network of tributaries, locks, and canals, the barges docked in South Works’s old North Slip, the nautical chute that once received the thousand-foot-long Erwin H. Gott, the Queen Mary of the U.S. Steel Great Lakes Fleet. Dump trucks spread topsoil over several acres north and south of the slip—enough to build a park, but not enough to cover the entire site.
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