High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  The question for Dolores wasn’t whether she wanted to move into public housing but which of the new developments would take her. “Public housing was my best bet for my children,” she’d say. There weren’t any vacancies in the Ida B. Wells Homes, a South Side complex that had been built exclusively for black residents. When the Wells Homes were completed, in 1941, 18,000 families applied for the 1,662 units; First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited, and the opening was cause for a parade, with marchers waving placards declaring “Better Housing, Better Health, Better Citizens.” Dolores filled out a CHA application at a church on Forty-Seventh Street, in the Bronzeville neighborhood, and a social worker asked for documentation showing that she was married and that Hubert had a job. “You had to prove everything,” Dolores would recall. The interview covered their rental and work history, Che Che’s grades and the family’s values. Another person from the agency visited their apartment to see how Dolores kept house. She had no idea what they wrote down in their notebooks. She cared only that she passed the test. The elaborate screening worked as a kind of validation; they, among the city’s hordes of working poor, had proven worthy of elevation. In the new developments, the CHA awarded prizes for the best gardens and issued fines for littering. A spot in public housing felt like a leap into the middle class.

  She first thought she might try for Altgeld Gardens, on the far South Side. It was built during the war, a hundred and thirty blocks from the Loop, so that African Americans could work in the nearby steel mills along Lake Calumet. With its 1,500 homes on 157 acres of formerly vacant land, Altgeld was like a self-contained, all-black village. The public housing development was so large and isolated that it had its own on-site Board of Health clinic, library, and church, its own grocery and drugstore, its own nursery, elementary, and high schools. One of Dolores’s aunts lived there, in a compact box of a rowhome with a little upstairs and downstairs, a tiny front lawn, and a backyard. Her aunt loved it, and Dolores was drawn to the idea of tending her own garden. In her basement apartment on Prairie Avenue, they hardly got any light at all, and she didn’t dare open the window too wide for fear of what might blow in from the alley. But Dolores couldn’t get over how remote Altgeld felt. It was basically in Indiana. It didn’t connect to streetcars or trains, and the bus service was spotty. “When I’m ready to go somewhere, I don’t want to have to wait for a scheduled bus that might not be there for an hour,” she’d say.

  That’s when she looked at Cabrini. After its 1950 survey of the Cabrini Extension Area, the CHA razed the slum alongside the rowhouses, demolishing the 2,325 units of substandard housing there; in their place, the agency erected fifteen separate towers that stood seven, ten, and nineteen stories tall, a total of 1,925 apartments. The original plans called for sixteen buildings, with the tallest of them reaching only nine and sixteen stories, but to further cut down on costs, the extra floors were added and an entire building eliminated. The nearly identical designs of the high-rises added to the speed and inexpensiveness of the construction. The towers were stripped-down, modernist plinths, with row after row of windows. Constructed of wine-colored bricks set inside a latticed frame of exposed white concrete, they had the look of graph paper, with repeating red boxes outlined in white. Because of the brick color, the fifteen high-rises came to be known locally as the “Reds.”

  Although the high-rises resulted in a net loss to the area of four hundred units of housing, the complex was prized for using just 13 percent of the thirty-five-acre site. The towers were ringed by vast plazas and lawns. Builders trucked in 25,000 cubic yards of topsoil; they planted 10,000 bushes and 500 trees, and protected it all with 23,000 square feet of chain-link fencing. The several square blocks between Chicago Avenue and Division Street were closed off to through streets and re-formed into a massive, pedestrian-only “superblock,” with no businesses, street traffic, or other uses apart from housing, a school, and a community center. It was a purity of modernist city planning, influenced by the avant-garde “towers in the park” urban reimagining of the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. When all fifteen of the towers were fully operational in 1958, the Cabrini Extension was Chicago’s largest public housing high-rise complex, a template for the many others to come. “We thought we were playing God in those days,” said Lawrence Amstadter, one of the development’s architects. “We were moving people out of some of the worst housing imaginable and we were putting them into something truly decent. We thought we were doing a great thing, doing a lot of innovative design things.”

  A handbill for the new development was written as if speaking directly to Dolores. “For families for whom private enterprise has not been able to build or operate decent, safe and sanitary dwellings at prices within low-income budgets . . . just a mile, or 10 minutes by street car, from the Loop.” It was close to “Near North Side parks and beaches . . . handy to swimming and fishing in Lake Michigan,” and “down the street from Montgomery Ward’s big retail store.” The Larrabee Street bus offered a straight shot into downtown. You could walk to a hundred different factories to find work. The Cabrini Extension towers weren’t designed with interior hallways; rather, each floor included an open-air gallery. “Sidewalks in the air,” Elizabeth Wood called these exposed ramps. In a high-rise with hundreds of apartments, each family could have “ready access to the out-of-doors,” the CHA pointed out. “An open porch on the nineteenth floor is a convenient play space for small children under mother’s watchful eyes. . . . It adds zest to living in the new home for families who formerly had to come out of basements to see daylight.”

  And the CHA promised that the addition of nearly two thousand units of public housing to the six hundred that already existed in the rowhouses would be a boon to the long-neglected area. More public housing meant more modern construction, more retail, and more amenities and services. The CHA advertised that the tall apartment towers would “blend with the rowhouse and garden apartments of present Cabrini,” declaring, “Twenty-five hundred families in housing easy to make into good homes will change the whole neighborhood!” Everyone in Dolores’s family lived on the South Side. But the idea of life at Cabrini grabbed ahold of her. “Near North, near everything,” she recited like a hymn.

  2

  The Reds and the Whites

  DOLORES WILSON

  THE WILSONS WERE one of the first families, in 1956, to move into their nineteen-story Cabrini Extension high-rise. They were assigned an apartment on the fourteenth floor, and everything smelled of fresh paint. Dolores had never been that high in the sky before. She forced herself to the edge of their “sidewalk in the air,” the walkway outside the apartment, and clutched the chest-high fencing as she peered down. The cars looked no bigger than toys. “I almost fainted,” she would recall. That was the first day. “Then after a while you grow used to everything.” Soon she was delighting in her lordly view of Chicago’s rippled skyline and the blue-gray blur of the lake disappearing into the horizon. Just as the CHA had advertised, she stretched out on what they called the ramp, enjoying the breeze, while her children played alongside her. Flies and mosquitoes didn’t reach fourteen stories, nor did all the sounds of the street. She started to feel sorry for her neighbors who filled the apartments on the floors below.

  Like all the new Cabrini towers, the Wilsons’ building was known impersonally by its address, 1117 N. Cleveland, which was painted in a somber blocky script above the front entrance. The architect Lawrence Amstadter had wanted to install metal numerals and letters, explaining that it would actually cost less to do so. But he was told the metal gave off the appearance of being pricier. “Public housing was considered charity,” he said. “It had to look economical.” The entitlement had the tricky task of ensuring that those with too little received only just enough. That was fine by Dolores. “It was the projects,” she’d say, by which she meant it was clean and safe and spectacular to behold. They now had five full rooms, with a large living room, a kitchen, and their own private bathroom. She and Hube
rt slept in one bedroom, the boys in another, and the girls in a third. There was a fridge, a stove, and hot and cold water. The walls were plum, the floors and ceilings unbreached.

  Her mother would phone when the temperature dropped into the teens, worried that Dolores might be inside the apartment barefoot. Dolores would hush Hubert as he shouted from the other room that she didn’t have on any shoes. But this wasn’t a South Side tenement. The heat in their building pulsed through the floors and enveloped them. Outside, the frigid air rolling in off the lake or the prairies blasted the high-rise. But inside the temperature exceeded eighty degrees. On the most penetrating winter days, with ice layering on the ramps and the wind roaring like a jet engine, Dolores still cracked her window. And they paid just a small, fixed amount for utilities and a monthly rent that was based on their annual income. The interior walls, too, were solid cinder block. If a fire broke out in any kitchen in the building, the flames couldn’t go any farther than that apartment. Dolores would demonstrate by entering each room and shutting the door. “It was fireproof,” she would say. “The whole thing was fireproof. Even the smoke couldn’t get in there. It was like heaven.”

  The comparison turned out to be a common one: something as elemental as a modest home seemed divine after the damnation of its absence. “It’s heaven here,” a different mother who moved into one of the other newly built red Cabrini high-rises told the press. “We used to live in a three-room basement with four kids. It was dark, damp and cold.” J. S. Fuerst, one of Elizabeth Wood’s “do-gooders” at the CHA, headed up the agency’s research and statistics division and had overseen the 1950 survey of the Cabrini Extension Area. For a book of interviews he titled When Public Housing Was Paradise, Fuerst collected dozens of similar testimonials from early occupants of Chicago’s public housing. “It’s almost like I died and went to heaven,” one tenant said about moving into a low-rise development. “We felt it was just paradise,” another resident told him. “We felt this was just the greatest housing that we could live in!” In Dolores’s basement apartment on Prairie, if the shared toilet didn’t flush or a circuit shorted, she could call her landlord. But he might just as soon put them out as fix the place. At Cabrini, the government owned her home. There was a city agency responsible for answering her requests. Her building had a team of janitors on call around the clock. Groundskeepers maintained the gardens and lawns that circled her tower like a moat.

  Dolores discovered, too, that she liked living around a lot of people. Her building and its conjoined nineteen-story twin, 1119 N. Cleveland, together held 262 apartments and almost a thousand residents. Towers of the same crosshatched red brick faced her on all sides. “The more the merrier,” Dolores would say. “It was nineteen floors of friendly, caring neighbors. Everyone watched out for each other. No gangs, drugs, or shootings.” One of her sisters moved to a residential street on the West Side, and it was so quiet a cat slinking in the bushes would scare Dolores. “If everybody is laughing and happy or fighting, I know there’s life out there,” she’d say.

  All the families in the high-rises had gone through the same careful screening, and most of the households had two parents at home. People kept their doors unlocked and dropped by one another’s apartments when they needed to borrow sugar or a cup of milk. They looked after one another’s children. Dolores’s next-door neighbors were Puerto Rican, and she got along with them great, even though the aromas of their cooking wafted onto the ramp. “I like garlic,” she’d say, “but I don’t like the smell of it.” Dolores became close friends with a woman named Martha who lived on the second floor and had five children as well. They’d go on outings together, sometimes bringing along another girlfriend from the building who also had five kids. They’d play in the large playground. Or they’d walk to Seward Park or the Isham YMCA or to Pioneer market, the three adults marching the fifteen children. “We looked like a parade,” Dolores said.

  In the mornings, thousands of people flushed out of the high-rises on their way to work. Many had jobs at Montgomery Ward, the giant retailer and mail-order cataloguer, which was the neighborhood’s largest employer. Oscar Mayer, an immigrant from Bavaria, had opened his business selling “old world” sausages and Westphalia hams in Chicago in 1883, and five years later moved to the corner of Sedgwick and Division, just across Seward Park from Dolores’s building. The eight-story plant produced hot dogs and sliced lunchmeats. Dozens of other small factories near the river made everything from Turtle Wax and tamales to tractors, donuts, comic books, and children’s toys. Industries lined the neighboring boulevards, producing paint, radios, elevator parts, billboards, and Dr. Scholl’s shoes and arch supports; others manufactured clothes, luggage, cameras, power plant equipment, picture frames, auto parts, and office supplies. A number of the Midwest’s candy companies made their confections in the area, and Dolores and her children could taste the chocolate in the air. The neighborhood had an old settlement house, funded by the city’s welfare council, called the Lower North Center, which had been housed in an eighty-year-old building. When the Cabrini Extension went up, it was rebuilt into a low-slung brick building the same color as the Reds, with classrooms, a nursery, meeting halls, and a gymnasium. CHA tenants used sewing machines there to learn dressmaking, and they went to the center to get coached for the civil service exam.

  Hubert held a number of different jobs, and quit a number of them, too. “Why are you home so early?” Dolores would ask him, knowing the answer. “I just walked out,” he’d reply, explaining that they’d treated him unfairly. But the next morning he’d head out and land something new. One of their neighbors had walked into the Seeburg jukebox plant the same day he’d moved into his Cabrini apartment and was offered a position. “When do you want me to start?” he asked. “Right now,” came the response. Only once, after Hubert had been laid off from a seasonal construction job, did the Wilsons consider going on welfare. But they thought that they’d be forced to give up their car and television and other belongings before they qualified. Instead they borrowed a little money from Dolores’s parents, just enough to get by, and Hubert soon found work again. Eventually he was hired by the CHA as a janitor. He joined the brigade of custodians moving each day among the fifteen Cabrini high-rises, hauling trash, cleaning hallways and stairwells, and straightening up anything that was in disarray.

  ONE OF DOLORES’S new neighbors was also among Cabrini’s most famous residents. Jerry Butler, the soul singer known as the Iceman, had been born in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in 1939, and at three his parents left sharecropping in the delta for work in the war industries in Chicago. They settled into a tenement just a block from the Frances Cabrini rowhouses, the family living in a three-room basement apartment with no hot water that sat squarely within the area detailed in the CHA’s Portrait of a Chicago Slum. The law now gave priority in the new high-rise public housing to families cleared from slum sites, and after the Butlers’ building was torn down to make way for the Cabrini Extension towers, they moved into 1117 N. Cleveland. While a student at Jenner, the local public school, Butler delivered newspapers on the Gold Coast, and at age twelve he had a job in a plastics company, operating an injection-molding machine from 4:00 p.m. until midnight. As a teenager, he also stuffed mattresses at a nearby factory, and one of his coworkers took him to the West Side to sing at a basement ministry called the Traveling Souls Spiritualist Church. The minister was a mystic who said she communed with a spirit guide from among the dead. She also had a grandson, a pint-size nine-year-old named Curtis Mayfield, who knew how to play the guitar and piano and who could sing in a high tenor that complemented the lower register of Butler’s already silky baritone. The kids formed part of a quartet, the Northern Jubilee Gospel Singers, and began to tour spiritualist conventions. A couple of years later, Mayfield moved with his mother and siblings into a Cabrini rowhouse on Hudson Avenue. With its front- and backyard and private toilet, it was luxurious after the run-down hotel where they’d been staying.

&
nbsp; Jerry and Curtis knew of Ramsey Lewis, who had grown up in the Cabrini rowhouses and had already gone on to cut two records with his jazz trio. But they weren’t into jazz. They sang doo-wop together outside the towers. They put on shows at the Lower North Center and practiced in the basement of Butler’s high-rise and in a club room at the Seward Park field house. By the benches in the park, a wino named Doug played an old guitar, producing a masterful sound, and the boys studied him for hours. Butler wanted to be a chef then, and he crossed Division Street, two blocks from his apartment, and signed up for culinary classes at Washburne Trade School. Many of the city’s unions operated apprenticeship programs out of the high school, and professional chefs sometimes showed up to hire for their kitchens. When Butler started as a freshman, he was one of only a handful of black students. Then as the school became fully integrated, the unions pulled their apprenticeships.