High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  Dinke did it on air, a cappella, a rap about the stench in the stairwells and the body he saw on the blacktop and the time someone fired two shotgun blasts through the front door of his apartment and what it was like to perform in a band there. A music producer watching wanted to record the song. He didn’t know anyone at Cabrini-Green, so he looked in the phone book and called a neighborhood liquor store. He asked if they knew about the kid who rapped on Oprah. Of course they did. They passed along the message, and Dinke went to a recording studio and did the song in a single take.

  “Cabrini Green Rap,” like other straightforward raps of the mid-eighties, lands hard on the AA BB end rhymes, marching ahead to the steady beat of synthesized drums. But the song is alive with the tragedy of a specific place that Dinke loves. In a thumbnail history, he rhymes, “Cabrini-Green was built for the low income / So the people could live a little better than bums.” He relates how the lawns and flowers disappeared, how the development deteriorated and the name itself came to evoke an idea about cities in decline. Most of all he conveys the particulars of a friend’s murder, showing how violence remains singular and devastating even when it’s accepted as commonplace: “I never will forget my man Larry Potts / Or the terrifying night that he got shot.”

  7

  Concentration Effects

  KELVIN CANNON

  JUST AS BO John had predicted when recruiting Kelvin Cannon and the other middle schoolers behind Schiller, the Gangster Disciples took over much of Cabrini-Green. The GDs presided in the white high-rises, the rowhouses, and all but a handful of the red towers. Kelvin grew with the gang. He was dedicated, and he paid attention. He studied what he needed to do to be a leader. “To be aware is to be alive,” he’d say. Standing outside 714 W. Division, he’d notice a car creeping past, the passengers sneaking looks at him and his friends. He’d shepherd everyone inside, and they’d already be on an upper floor when the car turned up Division to ride up on them. They called him “Righteous Folks.” He didn’t present himself as a wild gangbanger. He didn’t hurt people for no reason or sneak up with guns on guys. He was someone who’d take up a collection when a fellow Disciple was hurt or killed.

  Cannon was on the Cooley High baseball team, pitching, catching, and playing left field. After a brawl at the school, he was called into the office. He claimed innocence, challenging a police officer to search him for weapons. He’d forgotten about the reefer he had hidden inside his hat, and he was expelled. Cannon had broken a hundred rules, for fighting and weapons and drugs. But he’d never before been caught like that, so the punishment seemed unjust. Still, he had to accept that he’d slipped up. “What goes around comes around,” he reasoned.

  When Cannon was sixteen, two of his friends told him they were going to rob an older woman who was selling drugs out of her third-floor apartment in Dolores Wilson’s building. The woman had moved to 1230 N. Burling from the South Side, and she and her sons were believed to be Blackstone Rangers. “They were like opposition to our organization,” Cannon said. “Another gang comes into your territory, tries to set up shop, you know the repercussions. You got to shut them down.” He and his friends entered the next-door building. Cannon hid on the ramp as the other two knocked on the woman’s door, saying they were there to buy weed. When the door opened, they pulled out guns and called for Cannon to join them. He saw three women seated on a couch, all of them his mother’s age. Rifling through the kitchen and bedrooms, he bagged up whatever drugs and money he found, and they left. Except for a shot fired that didn’t hit anyone, the robbery was unremarkable, one incident among many. Cannon might not have remembered it if it hadn’t come back on him.

  A couple of weeks later, he was at the county jail, on an unrelated gun possession charge, when he saw his cousin Greg across the bullpen. Greg, it turned out, was in there for the robbery in the Burling building. They were first cousins, and someone had fingered Greg for the crime, mistaking the two of them. When Greg realized the mix-up, he told the police. In an interrogation room, a cop said to Cannon, “We got your cousin. He said you could clear him and tell us who else was involved.” Cannon couldn’t inform on his friends—that would be a violation of the Disciples code. Greg shouldn’t have said anything, either. “That’s not being an honorable Disciple,” Cannon would say. But he couldn’t hold a grudge against family. Greg later went to the penitentiary on a thirty-year sentence for ten robberies he committed in Chicago and Michigan. Cannon tried to fight his own case in court. By the time a judge ruled on it, nearly two years later, Jane Byrne was living at Cabrini-Green and the city was making an example of anyone arrested there. Cannon was eighteen then, a father, and charged as an adult with home invasion and armed robbery. It was his first conviction, and he was given seven years, of which he’d have to serve at least three and a half.

  At Stateville, a bunch of guys from Cabrini-Green worked in the kitchen, and they helped Cannon land a job there as well. As he delivered food, he got to know the Disciples leadership, the board members, and they took note of how Cannon carried himself. He was mature and smart, keeping himself busy, never boasting about what he’d done or who he knew. They pointed out to Cannon that he had an out date. Many of them didn’t, and they told him he had no business in prison, that he needed to go home and take care of his family, raise his newborn son. Cannon’s father would visit, and they’d pray together that Cannon would come to lead a truly righteous life. “Prison made me a better person,” Cannon would say. “I was so wild back then. I had no regard for other people. I was going to get killed or be in the penitentiary the rest of my life. You listen to the old-timers, as a daily thing, how they lost their life in prison. They were trying to save me.”

  Cannon became friends with Johnny Veal, who was in his second decade of a 100- to 199-year sentence for his part in the 1970 slaying of Sergeant James Severin and Officer Anthony Rizzato. Veal was Cobra Stones, but he told Cannon that inside the prison they both rode Cabrini. The black community from the Near North Side could feel like a small town, everyone bunched together on an island of a few blocks and parceled into a handful of neighborhood schools. All around them were wealthier and whiter communities, cutting them off from the black neighborhoods to the south and west. Everyone knew one another’s families, if not each other personally—You’re a McNeal, right? A Brown? One of the Campbells? Them Marlow’s people. Veal explained that this was also the meaning of Cabrini-Green. They were from the same village, and the guys in the joint from Cabrini, whether they were Disciples, Cobra Stones, or Vice Lords, represented their neighborhood. “He taught me never to forget my roots,” Cannon remembered. “He was schooling me, telling me not to tear down Cabrini-Green but to help build it up.”

  EVEN WHEN THE Cabrini-Green high-rises were new, in the 1950s and 1960s, the first residents already talked about their home as being doomed. “We’re living on a gold mine,” Hubert Wilson had always told his family. Cabrini was a mistake, and the city wouldn’t allow a black settlement to remain so close to downtown and the Gold Coast. People spoke of the secret plans hatched by Realtors and government officials, seeing signs of their forced removal all around them. Then in 1973, the city, along with downtown real estate and business interests, published “Chicago 21,” a comprehensive development plan to reverse two decades of economic decline and flight to the suburbs. “The Central Communities must be revitalized to again become desirable both for living and for working,” the report stated. “They must be efficient, economic and secure, and they must also provide maximum opportunity for human fulfillment.” Eleven centrally located communities, including Cabrini-Green, were targeted for reinvention and resettlement. To survive, the city had to rebuild its tax base. The poor, black, and brown people who currently sought human fulfillment in these areas believed that their homes would be taken from them, remade, and given to wealthier newcomers who were themselves considered more desirable.

  The Cabrini-Green activist Marion Stamps helped form the Coalition to Stop Chica
go 21, and the citywide alliance of blacks, Latinos, and working-class whites was one of the groups that got behind the first mayoral run of Harold Washington, in 1979, and then organized for him more systematically during the 1983 election. Washington had been a precinct captain on the South Side, a position passed down to him from his father. He rose up in Daley’s Democratic machine, serving in the Illinois House and Senate, and he won a seat in the US House of Representatives in 1980. But Washington showed flashes of independence that put him at odds with the party stalwarts. He split with Daley over police abuse in the black community, demanding that the city create an independent review board to investigate cases of brutality and misconduct. A preternaturally gifted orator, Washington could sound like he was performing Shakespeare, a Falstaff with a large, round face creasing into a smile, even as he was telling an opponent to drop dead. “The term ‘patronage,’ like its close cousin, ‘paternalism,’ comes from the Latin ‘pater,’ meaning father,” he announced to a crowd in 1980. “Every citizen pays for the patronage system in poor city services and poorly constructed facilities. We pay for it when city government puts big business and downtown interests before the needs of average citizens. But my community, black Chicago, suffers most deeply.”

  In the summer of 1982, African Americans boycotted a Grant Park music festival called ChicagoFest, after Mayor Byrne cut black representation on various city boards and commissions. Coming near the end of Byrne’s first term, the protest was a surprising success. Stevie Wonder, set to perform, cancelled, as did dozens of other acts. Suddenly, there was a coordinated effort to sign up unregistered black voters in the city. People were registered at libraries and churches, at welfare offices and grocery stores and in public housing. Marion Stamps helped lead the voter drive on the Near North Side, and Dolores Wilson walked her high-rise, signing up her neighbors. Citywide, more than 130,000 people were added to the rolls, with most of them coming from predominantly black precincts. “I’m running to end Jane Byrne’s four-year effort to further institutionalize racial discrimination in this great city,” Washington announced, folding Byrne into his critiques of President Reagan’s urban austerity measures. During the speech in which he declared his candidacy, Stamps interrupted Washington, yelling, “Harold, you are like the Second Coming.”

  Stamps ran for alderman of her ward, and when Washington campaigned at Cabrini-Green alongside her, thousands of people flocked around them. Ed Vrdolyak, a councilman from the city’s industrial Southeast Side, tried to motivate Byrne’s supporters by feeding on their dread of a racial takeover. African Americans now made up 40 percent of Chicago’s population. “It’s a racial thing,” Vrdolyak said. “I’m calling on you to save your city, to save your precinct. We’re fighting to keep the city the way it is.” Only a handful of white politicians and very few of the city’s media outlets endorsed Washington. When asked whether her support of a black candidate wasn’t the flip side of the same Chicago racism, Stamps rejected the idea. “They have tried to keep us for so long not being proud of our own,” she said. “And I’m saying, ‘Feel good about yourself and vote for one that is part of you.’ Harold Washington is blood of our blood. We don’t have to apologize about that. He is a father of our fathers. And a son of our sons.”

  Stamps lost her bid to the neighborhood’s longtime incumbent, Burt Natarus. But with a record turnout in black precincts, Washington won the Democratic primary, as Byrne and Richard M. Daley, the Cook County state’s attorney and son of the former mayor, effectively split the white vote. Daley endorsed Washington in the general election, even as many whites in Democratic Chicago chose race over party. Washington’s Republican opponent campaigned with the slogan, “Epton for Mayor—Before It’s Too Late.” Out of a total of 1.3 million votes cast, Washington won by fewer than 50,000, becoming the city’s first black mayor. The attacks on his administration began immediately. Vrdolyak’s coalition of twenty-nine white aldermen halted almost all activity in the fifty-member city council. Washington was able to cut the budget by trimming the number of city workers, and he signed on to the Shakman decrees, which made it illegal to hire or fire city employees based on political expediency. But most of his attempts at reforms, or even at appointing board members to the various city departments, were blocked. Every council meeting was a battle of insults and innuendo. Not all the “Vrdolyak 29” were outright racists, but some were. “Scurrilous hooligans,” the grandiloquent mayor called his foes. The stalemate came to be known as the “Council Wars.”

  Under a black mayor, with a black head of the CHA and a black police chief, troubles in public housing persisted. The CHA was crippled by debt. During the Reagan years, the HUD budget was cut by 75 percent, while money from rents continued to dry up, and the CHA desperately needed to upgrade its aging and poorly maintained properties. At Cabrini-Green, bedroom ceilings leaked, sinks and tubs didn’t work, windows wouldn’t close, and apartments lacked refrigerators or stoves. The CHA was already performing a kind of triage. It spent almost a tenth of its annual budget of $146 million on elevator repairs alone. Another $44 million was needed for asbestos removal, and three-quarters of a billion dollars over five years for the repair of its 1,300 buildings.

  Washington picked Renault Robinson to right the tottering agency. Robinson had helped found the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, a group created to challenge racism within the Chicago police department’s own ranks. But as the chairman of the CHA, he warred with the agency’s executive director, leading to deadlock. He fired dozens of elevator repairmen after an investigative news team showed them loafing on the job but did so before finding replacements; residents in the high-rises were relegated to the stairs. A tenant on her way to the hospital had to walk down ten flights—she collapsed and died. Robinson abruptly dismissed 260 plumbers, pipe fitters, glaziers, and electricians for not doing “a full day’s work for a full day’s pay.” With an understaffed maintenance crew and amid a brutal winter, however, the boilers broke, buildings went without heat, and pipes froze and burst. The CHA was forced to rehire the craftsworkers and pay them $400,000 in damages. Marion Stamps called for a rent strike at Cabrini-Green, demanding that the Washington administration do something about the insufferable conditions. By Washington’s third year in office, his housing agency was running an $8 million annual deficit. The CHA lost out on $7 million in federal funds because it missed the grant deadline. “The CHA was systematically ignored and raped,” Washington told a hundred residents at 1230 N. Burling. He listed the mayors who preceded him, saying that they “didn’t fix the elevators, they didn’t fix the trash chutes, they didn’t give you police protection. They didn’t give you a damn thing.” Washington said, “I didn’t build the CHA. . . . Had I been mayor twenty-five years ago, this mess would never have been created.”

  The idea of tearing down the high-rises, previously considered politically and logistically untenable, began to be floated as a thought experiment with greater frequency. The chief financial officer at the CHA mentioned to reporters that the agency might have to sell off its well-located properties just to pay its bills. Renault Robinson let it be known that developers called him frequently to express interest in buying Cabrini-Green. One group of Realtors took him out to lunch and offered $100 million for a clear title to the Near North Side development. “The sale would remove what has become one of the most crime-plagued, socially unacceptable public housing projects in the country. And it would pave the way for one of the most positive residential real estate developments in the city,” said Alderman Ed Burke, the other ringleader of the Vrdolyak 29. Alderman Natarus, an ally of Washington’s, sent the mayor a worn copy of a letter he’d written to Richard J. Daley in 1972 that opened with the line, “As you know the situation at Cabrini Green continues to be precarious.” He began his letter to Washington the same way, emphasizing that little had changed in more than a decade. “The repeated incidents of sniper fire have occurred in every administration in which I have served as a public official,�
�� he wrote. He proposed a possible solution. “It is not inconceivable that three story walk-up units could be built within the open spaces of Cabrini Green and that as soon as these units are completed for occupancy, steps could be initiated to demolish the high-rise buildings.”

  The suggestions resulted as well from the dramatic changes to the areas surrounding Cabrini-Green. By the 1980s, the revitalization of the central communities detailed in the Chicago 21 plan had started to come to pass. The anti-urban impulse that had sent middle-class families fleeing to the suburbs had reversed itself, and young professionals—the decade’s Yuppies—wanted to live not in the all-residential bedroom communities of their parents but in city centers near their jobs and one another. One of the first new developments to be built alongside Cabrini-Green was Atrium Village. The property bordering the El tracks there had been vacant for almost a decade, and the city’s Department of Urban Renewal was happy to give it away. In 1978, an alliance of four local churches partnered with a developer to build a 307-unit complex of townhomes and geodesic high-rises, each of them facing inward and creating a kind of fortress. Atrium Village was a racially diverse, mixed-income development, with quotas for the number of renters receiving heavy federal subsidies. Jesse White moved into an apartment there, and Dolores Wilson served on Atrium’s board. The churches conceived of Atrium Village as a bridge between Cabrini and the Gold Coast, a step up out of public housing. But more people ventured across the bridge from the other side. The market-rate units were snapped up, ushering in a building boom.