by Ben Austen
Fearing her getting too serious, Dolores’s parents didn’t allow her to go steady with any one guy. Throughout high school she dated not only Hubert but also George, Clifford, Otis, Frank, and Bo. It was a short stroll from her apartment past South Parkway, which would later be renamed Martin Luther King Drive, and over to the expanse of Washington Park. She’d sit on the benches with her different boyfriends or walk with them around the lagoon, or watch the games in the fields. Dolores loved her some Frank Jenkins, but she figured she loved Hubert more. Hubert looked older than the rest of them, even though he was the same age. And he could make Dolores laugh, the way he told outlandish stories, his wit matching hers. People would say that the two of them together, with their banter, could have a comedy act on the radio. Hubert quit high school his junior year to help with his family’s expenses. He was the type who’d do any sort of job, as long as it was legal. He shoveled coal into people’s basements, cut ice from the lake, delivered refrigerators, laid tile.
Dolores didn’t realize how well off her family was until she and Hubert started swapping tales about the Depression. More than 40 percent of all workingmen in Chicago were unemployed during those years, and the city had a shortage of 150,000 affordable homes, with the demand increasing and nothing new being built. A Hooverville formed downtown, on the outskirts of Grant Park, hundreds of jerry-built structures made of cardboard, scrap, and tar paper. “Building construction may be at a standstill elsewhere, but down here everything is booming,” an out-of-work miner and railroad brakeman who’d been elected “mayor” of the shantytown told the press. On the South Side, Dolores had her clothes dry-cleaned at her father’s shop, and when her father was drafted into the navy her mother found work at a factory making aircraft. Hubert, on the other hand, had been eating neck bones cooked every kind of way—fried, boiled, broiled, barbecued. His family had an apartment, a meager one, but they subsisted on the government charity boxes with NOT TO BE SOLD stamped on them.
It was no surprise to Dolores that her father didn’t think Hubert good enough for her. Always the dandy, her dad would stand in the wide window of their apartment, one shined shoe propped up on the sill, and at the sight of Hubert say, “Here comes Pete the Tramp,” referring to the old comic strip. He’d turn it into a kind of mocking song, as Hubert ambled up the block in his work clothes, a shovel hefted over his shoulder, a cigar stub tucked into the corner of his mouth, a dusting of coal on his hands and face.
When Dolores was eighteen, in 1947, and enrolled at Woodrow Wilson Junior College, Hubert picked her up after classes. One day when they reached Prairie Avenue he wouldn’t get out of the car. He stared silently into his lap, his chest heaving. He was sweating so much he looked to be melting. Then with a dour expression he asked Dolores if she would marry him. Now she couldn’t breathe, feeling she might be having a heart attack. But soon they were both laughing, and quickly picked a date for the wedding and started hurtling ahead through the years, imagining the many milestones to come in their lives together. Then a thought paralyzed Dolores: Which one of them was going to tell her parents?
“You are,” he said.
“Uh-uh. You.”
DOLORES AND HUBERT Wilson, with their five children in a basement apartment, never considered leaving the South Side, let alone moving to the Near North Side. They thought they had no options in the city other than the Black Belt or maybe the West Side neighborhoods that had started filling with migrants from the South around the time they got married. And besides, the wilderness of slum around the Cabrini rowhouses had its own notoriety in Chicago lore. As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, the settlement along the North Branch of the Chicago River was as undesirable a place to call home as there was in the city. It teemed with dangerous and dirty jobs. Men hauled loads between barges and trains, worked in warehouses, tanneries, meatpacking plants, machine shops, and any number of small factories. The city’s first ironworks was started along the river there, in 1857; by 1870, the North Chicago Rolling Mill employed 1,500 men, producing steel rails for the tracks that were steadily traversing the country. There was a massive gasworks on the riverbank a block from where the rowhouses would be built, an endless supply of coal fed into its hungry furnaces. While the resulting gas was stored in vats, the leftover tar and coke and other effluents flowed back into the mucky river. Black clouds of soot enveloped the neighborhood at all times, which is how the district came to be known as “Smoky Hollow.” The smell of sulfur was everywhere, too, and bright flames from the processed gas burst into the sky. And that’s why it was also called “Little Hell.”
It earned other nicknames as well, from the newly arrived immigrants who couldn’t afford to live elsewhere. When the Irish landed there, in the 1850s, the area became the “Kilgubbin,” named after the section of County Cork from which the refugees of the potato famine emerged. In 1865, it was one of the city’s largest “squatter villages,” according to the Chicago Times, which wrote that the land “numbered several years ago many thousand inhabitants, of all ages and habits, besides large droves of geese, goslings, pigs, and rats. It was a safe retreat for criminals, policemen not venturing to invade its precincts, or even cross the border, without having a strong reserve force.” The local Irish referred to their new home sometimes simply as “the patch.” Germans followed, working as small-scale farmers, peddling their produce out of wagons. Next came Swedes, who were even poorer than their predecessors, and their numbers were so great that they supported eight different Swedish-language newspapers and the nearby stretch of Chicago Avenue was dubbed the “Swede Broadway.” Then in the first years of the next century, with alarming speed, the Near North Side turned into “Little Sicily.” Some 13,000 immigrants from towns in southern Italy rushed in to take over homes and storefronts from the besieged Irish, and the neighborhood quickly became the city’s second-largest Italian enclave.
What distinguished this impoverished neighborhood above all else was its extraordinary proximity to Chicago’s most expensive real estate. On the South Side, the Black Belt became a world unto itself. But a mere ten blocks east of Little Hell, beside the lakefront, sat the city’s fanciest hotels and clubs, the high-end shops of Michigan Avenue, and the stately apartments bordered by tranquil streets of aristocratic single-family homes. One had to walk only a few minutes from this first world opulence to enter the third world meagerness along the river, with its garbage-laden alleyways, muddy lanes, and clotheslines crisscrossing overhead. The titans of industry and the city’s philanthropists lived in the Gold Coast neighborhood along Lake Shore Drive. Little Sicily, less than a mile away, was where “dark, shifty eyed men with inscrutable faces lounge warily in the shadows of an area way or in the murk of a corridor,” as the local press reported in 1915. The sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh made the short physical distance between these urban extremes the subject of his 1929 book, The Gold Coast and the Slum, in which he portrays the river district’s otherness as a pummeling of the senses:
Dirty and narrow streets, alleys piled with refuse and alive with dogs and rats, goats hitched to carts, bleak tenements, the smoke of industry hanging in a haze, the market along the curb, foreign names on shops, and foreign faces on the streets, the dissonant cry of the huckster and peddler, the clanging and rattling of railroads and the elevated, the pealing of the bells of the great Catholic churches, the music of marching bands and the crackling of fireworks on feast days, the occasional dull boom of a bomb or the bark of a revolver, the shouts of children at play in the street, a strange staccato speech, the taste of soot, and the smell of gas from the huge “gas house” by the river, whose belching flames make the skies lurid at night and long ago earned for the district the name Little Hell—on every hand one is met by sights and sounds and smells that are peculiar to this area, that are “foreign” and of the slum.
The combination of poverty and proximity helped turn the Near North Side ghetto into one of Chicago’s major vice districts. The sensationalized coverage of
the crimes committed there both exaggerated and contributed to the conditions. Zorbaugh describes the Italian neighborhood as a “bizarre world of gang wars, of exploding stills, of radical plots, of ‘lost’ girls, of suicides, of bombings, of murder.” The intersection of what today is Oak Street and Cambridge Avenue, or possibly a block east at Oak and Cleveland, was shared by a cleaner’s, a dyer’s, a Jewish dry goods shop, and a Sicilian saloon that featured live music. It was also said to be the site of a dozen homicides a year for almost two decades. More than a hundred unsolved murders were alleged to have occurred at what came to be known widely as Death Corner. The violence in Little Sicily was attributed to the Italian Mafia, especially during Prohibition, but there was also a shadowy group known as the Black Hand. In 1908, a rumor spread that the Black Hand society had placed a nitroglycerin bomb in the basement of Jenner Elementary, the school abutting Death Corner, which was set to detonate at 2:00 p.m. There was no bomb, but in a scene that would be replayed over the next century, students ignored their teachers and tumbled down the stairwells, trampling one another, as mothers raced over from their cold-water flats to rescue their children. In their elusiveness, the Black Hand assassins were depicted as phantasms, supernatural predators. Many of the neighborhood’s streets were elevated several feet above grade, and killers were said to lurk in the belowground coal sheds and half basements. In one brazen Death Corner murder recounted in the press, the culprits reportedly shot to death a man, waited for the police to arrive, and then before slipping away unseen shot the witnesses as they were giving their reports to the cops. Rumor had it that members of the Black Hand leaned over their victims and kissed them on the lips, to ensure that the ghosts of those they murdered wouldn’t haunt them.
In his first year as president, in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt created the federal Housing Division, as part of the Public Works Administration. By then the shortcomings of the for-profit real estate market were evident in mass evictions and eviction riots, in homeless encampments and in countless neighborhoods like Little Sicily. “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” Roosevelt announced in 1937, in his second inaugural address. “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” In the face of what looked like a humanitarian crisis—and with decades of shaming and lobbying by progressive slum reformers and proponents of modernized housing—the government mobilized its resources. The PWA built fifty-one public housing developments over the next four years, including three in Chicago. In 1937, after two years of wrangling over the particulars, Congress passed more-extensive legislation that established a federal housing agency. Chicago and other cities formed their own housing authorities to operate the subsidy locally. The CHA, under Elizabeth Wood’s leadership, picked sites for new public housing developments, and the infamy of Little Hell made it an obvious choice.
When the Frances Cabrini rowhouses were completed, in 1942, hundreds of federal, state, and city officials attended the dedication ceremonies on Chestnut Street and Cambridge Avenue. Mayor Edward Kelly, “his red hair like slag in a sea of Mediterranean complexions,” as one reporter recounted, announced that the 586 units of public housing “symbolize the Chicago that is to be. We cannot continue as a nation, half slum and half palace. This project sets an example for the wide reconstruction of substandard areas which will come after the war.”
Father Luigi Giambastiani, of Saint Philip Benizi Parish, located next to Death Corner, was among the leaders of the neighborhood’s Sicilian community to suggest that the rowhouses be named for Mother Francesca Cabrini. A nun who settled in the United States in 1889 and worked among the Italian poor, Mother Cabrini established a school and a hospital in Chicago as well as more than sixty institutions countrywide. She died in Chicago in 1917. “To you she is a social worker,” Father Giambastiani told the press, “but to us she is a saint.” In 1946, Rome would agree: Mother Cabrini became the first American citizen to be canonized, the patron saint of immigrants.
Working families with young dependents were initially given preference for admission into the planned Cabrini rowhouses, since they were often rebuffed in the open market. To secure a coveted spot, married couples had to pass rigorous screening and earn enough annually to meet minimum rent requirements. Very poor families, those who were unemployed, unstable, or unseemly—the new public housing wasn’t intended for them. The subsidy wasn’t charity or humanitarian assistance; the developments were supposed to revitalize the slums, not replicate them. Days before construction on the Cabrini rowhouses was to get under way, however, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Many of the factories in and around Little Sicily were converted to war-related industries. Amid the city’s affordable housing shortage, the CHA agreed to give families of veterans and war workers priority in the new development; in exchange, the agency was able to secure rationed building supplies and proceed with construction. The renters would pay between $24 and $37 a month for a three-bedroom home, based on their income, with electricity, hot water, and heating fuel included. But to accommodate war workers with their higher salaries, the CHA more than doubled the maximum amount that residents could earn yearly and still qualify for a unit, from $900 to $2,100. This at a time when a third of all Chicago families, and just about everyone in Little Hell, had an annual salary of less than $1,000. They would likely not find a home in this “Chicago that is to be.”
DOLORES WILSON
BEFORE DOLORES AND Hubert were married, Hubert was picked up by the police. He was accused of robbing a cleaner’s on his South Side block. His family assured the police that he’d been at home with them, but a neighbor fingered him as the thief, saying she thought the guy she may have seen in the dark alley three stories below looked sort of like Hubert. That was enough for the cops. They moved him from one precinct house to another, so his relatives couldn’t find him. At one of the police stations, officers handcuffed his wrists to the arms of a chair, demanding that he confess to the crime he didn’t commit. When he refused, two white cops standing on either side of him counted down, and at the same moment each one bashed an ear. The headaches from that beating lasted for the next thirty years of Hubert’s life.
Sometimes Dolores would think about all the pain that the police caused folks, how Chicago cops abused their power, especially in the city’s black neighborhoods, and she’d shake with contempt, losing her ability to speak. There was a black officer in their neighborhood named Sylvester Washington, though everyone called him “Two-Gun Pete,” for the pair of pearl-handled .357 Magnum revolvers he wore around his belt like an Old West gunslinger. Once, when Dolores had taken a group of children to the Bud Billiken Parade, an annual event in the South Side sponsored by the Defender, she lined them up to buy ice cream. Two-Gun Pete pushed over the little boy at the front of the line, for no other reason than to see the children topple in a row like dominoes. One night, Hubert was on his way home, wearing sunglasses, when Two-Gun stopped him. “Is the moon too bright for you?” the cop demanded. He smacked the glasses off of Hubert’s face and ordered him to pick them up. When Hubert bent over, Two-Gun kicked him in the back. Then the cop slapped the shades off of Hubert’s face again and told him to get them. The police officer had, officially, killed nine people while on duty, and the department, rather than punishing Two-Gun, rewarded him with promotions. Hubert knew what was coming, but he didn’t want to add to Two-Gun’s body count. The kick sent him to the ground.
With Hubert locked up for the cleaner’s robbery, his family hired a lawyer, and that put an end to the railroading between holding cells. Dolores baked biscuits and sent them to the jail. As Hubert bit into each one, he’d find tiny pieces of paper stuck to his tongue, notes that read, “I love you.” It turned out that it was Bo, one of Dolores’s other suitors, who’d broken into the cleaner’s. He was arrested, and Hubert was cleared of the crime.
The couple named their first child after Hubert
, but people called little Hubert “Chuck-a-Luck” as a baby, and when he took his first steps Dolores’s brother cried, “Che Che,” and that’s the name that stuck. Then came Michael, Debbie, Cheryl, and Kenny. Two of them were born in their apartment, with a county doctor showing up only after the delivery to cut the cord. Dolores and Hubert wanted better for their growing family than their basement apartment, so they tried to purchase a home. They learned about a subdivision soon to be built on the distant South Side. It was being constructed from the ground up, on empty land. With the help of Dolores’s aunt, they made the down payment for the house that existed only as an architectural plan. Dolores’s sister and sister-in-law and their families also bought into the same development. They each picked out their plots, and in their anticipation they talked endlessly together about what the houses would look like—how you’d walk through the front door and step down to enter the living room, like in a television program. Then Hubert came down with the Asian flu. He was working in construction, and for two days he couldn’t lift himself out of bed. On the third day, before the fever broke, he forced himself to return to the job, but it was too late. His boss fired him. The Wilsons fell behind on their payments and eventually lost the property. Dolores’s sister and sister-in-law soon pulled out, too. Losing the down payment didn’t bother Dolores too much, since she never got overly excited about money. But losing the dream of the thing hurt. She’d eventually shrug and say about the flu that ended their chance at owning a home, “How come some other part of the world always got to mess you up?”