High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  From 1979 to 1986, the communities around Cabrini-Green experienced $900 million in new construction or upgrades. Just to the south of the rowhouses, on the other side of Chicago Avenue, fluttering banners proclaimed a new creative community called River North, chock-full of renovated lofts, restaurants, and office space. To the north, townhouses along Larrabee now fringed the Cabrini development. In 1979, Waller High was transformed into the new Lincoln Park High School, with a revised curriculum, a refurbished building, and money for a band and a chorus. The principal was permitted to recruit high-performing students from out of district, and the student body fell from over 90 percent black to 50 percent. At the same time that the Tribune was publishing a twenty-nine-part series it titled “The American Millstone,” focused on “an underclass that is mostly black and poor and hopelessly trapped in the urban centers of Chicago,” the city was also being celebrated for its “urban renaissance.” A 1986 feature on the Near North Side noted that “new boutiques and rehabbed apartments are closing in on one of the country’s most spectacular examples of failed public housing: Cabrini-Green.” Cabrini was becoming an island of black abject poverty amid a sea of encroaching white affluence.

  As the black population of the Near North Side dwindled, those remaining were also in the process of being reconceptualized. Welfare families, single mothers, the perennially unemployed—the social programs of the Great Society had failed to lift them out of the depths of generational poverty. William Julius Wilson, then a sociologist at the University of Chicago, explained that larger structural transformations had robbed black neighborhoods in Chicago of much of their remaining wealth and stability. From 1967 to 1987, amid the shift from an industrial to a service economy, the city lost some 325,000 manufacturing jobs. Two-thirds of the job growth in the Chicago area occurred outside the city. Middle-class and working-class African Americans moved from their longtime neighborhoods, following jobs and better housing opportunities elsewhere, leaving behind a higher concentration of poor families. During the 1970s, the percentage of families living well below the poverty line increased in twenty-five of Chicago’s predominantly black communities. The number of black communities with unemployment rates above 15 percent jumped from one to fifteen. In his book The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson argued that those who were financially better off had acted as role models for the poor, buffers against both economic and personal collapse. Their departure, he asserted, compounded the impact of joblessness, resulting in “concentration effects”—the “social pathologies” and “ghetto specific culture and behavior” that came to dominate. By 1983, three-quarters of the black children born in Chicago were to unmarried mothers. Graduation rates at public high schools in black and Latino neighborhoods fell below 40 percent. The average age at which African Americans were arrested for violent crimes fell lower and lower. “Welfare and the underground economy are not only increasingly relied upon,” Wilson wrote, “they come to be seen as a way of life.”

  Wilson was building on the controversial Moynihan Report of 1965. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the assistant secretary of labor under President Johnson, wrote of the “tangle of pathology” afflicting families in black ghettoes. His language of disease distracted from his warnings about the increasing breakdown of social structures in impoverished black neighborhoods. Wilson, an African American scholar, was stressing that the problems of out-of-wedlock births, single-mother families, lack of formal education, and criminality had only worsened in the ensuing two decades. People in these high-poverty areas had fallen further outside the occupational and behavioral mainstream, and more than ever, he insisted, these issues needed to be addressed candidly. During the Reagan years, Wilson was sometimes mistaken for a conservative, since his rejection of liberal orthodoxies intersected with a view of inner-city ghettoes fostered by scholars on the right. Charles Murray, among others, denounced welfare programs as the actual cause of the black family’s dissolution, contending that poor people made the rational market decision to forego low-wage work for government handouts, and that parents even calculated to have more children out of wedlock for the bump in benefits another dependent provided. By this reasoning, it was more charitable to do away with all social welfare. But Wilson debunked these fallacies; the earned income tax credit, for instance, was established in the 1970s, and by conservatives’ logic, the expanded benefits for those who worked should have driven down the welfare rolls. Like Moynihan, he proposed not that government assistance be slashed but rather doled out more generously and strategically. Still, the popularizing of the notion that neighborhoods of concentrated poverty were destroying their inhabitants’ lives and creating a permanent “ghetto underclass” had a similar effect on many moderates and liberals at the end of the century as it had on the CHA do-gooders in 1950 who set out to raze the Little Hell slum—they were emboldened to rethink the government’s role in these communities, which now meant talking openly about retrenching the welfare state.

  Nowhere in Chicago were the concentration effects that Wilson lamented more pronounced than in the forced isolation and density of high-rise public housing. By the eighties, Chicago was home not only to three of the country’s twelve richest communities but also, amazingly, to ten of the country’s sixteen poorest census tracts, all of them containing large public housing complexes. Wilson pointed out that 83 percent of those living at Cabrini-Green in the early eighties were on welfare, and of the families with children, 90 percent of them, at least officially, had only a mother at home. “The projects simply magnify these problems,” Wilson wrote. The Chicago Urban League issued a report calling for an end to the tyranny of the high-rises. Editorial boards announced that Chicago was ready to rid its landscape of these civic disgraces.

  For residents of Cabrini-Green, the public discourse about their fate was more evidence that the mass evictions they’d always feared were finally upon them. Yes, they lived in what was now being recognized as concentrated poverty. But by necessity they’d also made it their home. Families grew up next to one another, generations of them. They watched one another’s children, shopped together, shared food, stepped up when a family lost a loved one or was in need. Many relied on an off-the-books economy of hairdressers, handymen, makeup artists, babysitters, auto mechanics, manicurists, shoe shiners, tailors, cooks, carpenters, and candy sellers. People bartered services and passed along news of job openings. Theories about concentrated poverty often ignored all that. Cabrini residents didn’t know how they’d manage elsewhere without the support of these longtime networks. They worried that crime and poverty would exist wherever they were sent. And it seemed doubtful that tearing down the most visible incarnation of these concentration effects would do away with the discrimination, government inefficiency, and fear that went into making the Cabrini-Greens of the city and the country in the first place.

  A group calling itself the Concerned Tenants of Cabrini Green Homes announced a community-wide meeting to warn of the power brokers who were then plotting against them. The flyers that were taped to lampposts and the walls of high-rise lobbies asked, “Are we next? Where will we go??” In the handbill’s line drawings, men in suits identified as “Investors,” “Developers,” and “Land Grabbers” stand to one side, laughing. A man labeled “Tenant” cowers, while an extended leg with “CHA” written along it delivers the banishing kick.

  KELVIN CANNON

  ON JUNE 7, 1984, Robert Cannon drove to Stateville to fetch his son. Kelvin had been barely eighteen when he was sent away; now he was twenty-one, with a body reshaped by weight lifting and starchy prison food. His waist size had stretched from a twenty-eight to a thirty-six, his neck thickened, and his chest now rolled with heavy muscles. He didn’t own a single item of clothing that fit. Cannon had earned $800 working in Stateville’s kitchen, and his father took him straight to Maxwell Street, the freewheeling outdoor market, where Cannon bought everything from pants and shirts to socks and underwear. His next stop was Cabrini-Green.

  In t
he months before his release, Cannon needed to find a place where he could live. When he left for prison, his son was three months old. The boy was now four and a half, but his mother had married and had additional children. He obviously wasn’t going to stay with her. Cannon’s mother lost the apartment in 714 W. Division because of his conviction, and his father didn’t invite him to join his new family on the South Side. Cannon reached out to William Blackmon, his best friend growing up. William was home after a stint in jail, and he told Cannon how good it felt to be back on the street. Cannon said he’d soon join him. “Just lay low until I get out there,” Cannon said. But then word reached him in Stateville that his friend was killed while trying to break into a Cabrini apartment. Another childhood friend now lived in 1230 N. Burling—the same building in which Cannon committed the robbery that got him locked up—and the friend said Cannon could stay with him. So that’s where he went, another former inmate paroled to Cabrini-Green.

  Cannon had heard countless times that prison either makes or breaks you. It definitely didn’t break him. He’d served time with the leaders of the Disciples and won their trust, proving himself over the years. He’d gone in strong, and come out stronger. Now, back home, people looked up to him for the time he’d served. He was a role model. The Gangster Disciples were organized, with regents, assistant coordinators, coordinators, governors, and a system for levying taxes. Cannon was named a Disciples don at Cabrini-Green, and a year later, at twenty-two, was appointed governor of all Cabrini-Green. “Cannon would be a success no matter what he did,” a police officer who worked the Cabrini-Green beat said. “If he grew up in suburban Glencoe, he’d be a doctor with the prettiest wife and the biggest house. At Cabrini-Green, he aspired to be like the most successful people in his community. He hit it out of the park. He became that guy.”

  Cannon didn’t have to recruit, since most of the boys wanted to be Gangster Disciples. It looked like fun to the young guys, and it paid for diapers and dinners, sneakers and jackets. Cannon told the ones who were thirteen or fourteen—the same age he’d been when Bo John recruited him—that they needed to spend more time in school before they could choose to be a GD. They had to have some education first. He liked to think of himself as a peacetime leader, not a war one. He’d practice drawing his gun in his bathroom mirror, working on his speed like in the Westerns. One time he accidentally shot a hole in the medicine cabinet. But he wasn’t into battling with the other organizations. He’d get up in the mornings, walk the land, see what was going on, and learn what had happened the day before. Sometimes he had to have friends violated, physically punished, when they’d snatched a purse or robbed another member’s house or raped. There was a code, and it had to be enforced. A guy might get GD glasses—punched in the face so many times his eyes swelled up into puffy rolls. Or they could get worse. Cannon’s goal was to smooth out problems before they reached that point. He thought some of the unity he’d seen in prison could be used back home. Guys at Cabrini had gone to schools together, slept in the same apartments, eaten at the same tables. And now that they were older and part of different organizations, he didn’t see why they couldn’t still coexist. He threw back-to-school picnics and organized sports leagues. The smoother he could make each day, the less chaos there was, the better he felt he was doing his job.

  As governor, Cannon never got rich. This wasn’t Scarface or Miami Vice—no boats or sports cars or penthouse apartments along the Chicago River. He even held down legit jobs at the same time, driving out to the suburbs to work as a forklift operator at a plant that mass-produced prepared foods. Just as William Julius Wilson had documented, most of the low-skill jobs had moved out to the suburbs, if not out of the Chicago area and the country altogether. You couldn’t walk or take a bus to a suburban office park or manufacturing plant. You needed a car, and one that didn’t break down in winter. Which is what happened to Cannon. His car stopped working, and he lost the factory job.

  Cannon did get his own apartment in 1230 N. Burling, and he managed to fix it up. Outside, the hallways were scribbled with tags. Inside his thirteenth-floor apartment, everything was bright rugs and blinds and plush furniture. He topped glass tables with framed photographs and hung two large paintings of black panthers. It was a three-bedroom, and he moved his mother in with him, since he was the reason she had been forced out in the first place. Police raided the apartment every other month or so. From the lobby or the upper floors you could see them coming, and word would reach Cannon that the officers were on their way upstairs. He’d open his door and lie on the carpeted floor before they got there. No need to wreck anything or throw him to the ground. The cops might kick him in the side for being a smart-ass, but they knew they weren’t going to find anything. And while he was arrested many times—for possession of drugs, intimidation, disorderly conduct—he managed to avoid another conviction. After the police raids, when Cannon was alone again in his apartment, he’d stare out the window, past the surrounding high-rises to the condos along Lake Shore Drive. “It looked like I was up there by the Gold Coast area,” he’d say. “If you looked out my window, you’d swear you weren’t in Cabrini. It was luxury.”

  8

  This Is My Life

  J. R. FLEMING

  BEFORE CHANGING HIS name, in his early thirties, to Willie J. R. Fleming, he was Willie McIntosh Jr. People were always shouting, “Junior, Junior, Junior!” It made him feel small. Growing up, J. R. heard countless stories about his father. Willie McIntosh Sr. had volunteered for Vietnam and later went AWOL. They said he was Chicago’s Frank Lucas, linking up with poppy producers in Southeast Asia and shipping the product stateside. He supposedly worked as a CIA operative in Nicaragua and who knew where else. They said he ran guns into Cabrini-Green. His nickname was Sweetness, and J. R. knew his father had to be slick to get his mother—a black-on-black-love, stop-the-violence war protestor—to marry him. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” Marlene McIntosh would say when J. R. asked for specifics about his father.

  J. R. was one of their six children, and when he was born, in 1973, they lived in the Henry Horner Homes. A few years later they came to Cabrini-Green. They lived in the 1150 N. Sedgwick building, the Rock, and J. R.’s father would sit out front with his friends, teaching J. R. how to fight, pitting him against other little boys as part of a training regimen, yelling at him to keep his guard up, to jab. Then, just as Jane Byrne was set to move into their high-rise, the McIntoshes left. Willie Sr. went to another of the red high-rises at Cabrini, with a girlfriend; Marlene took the children to the South Side, first to the Robert Taylor Homes, where J. R. played on a softball team named Tuff Enuff, and then on to the cylindrical towers of the Hilliard Homes. Marlene had a city job, in Harold Washington’s administration, and she was offered the chance to leave public housing and relocate with a rental voucher to the southern suburb of Dolton, a nearly all-white village about twelve blocks beyond the Chicago city limits. Marlene imagined she could give her children a better life there, and that’s how J. R. ended up in a small house in the suburbs.

  They lived on a tree-lined street of single-family bungalows. Their home had yards in front and back, a basement, an attic, and a porch. The meadows of a large public park began at their corner. “It was beautiful,” J. R. said. They were one of three black families from 142nd Street all the way to 151st, and sometimes while they walked to school people let their dogs loose to chase them. J. R. was never one to lack for confidence, though. In Dolton, he earned money raking leaves and shoveling snow and delivering newspapers. Determined to prove he was at least as smart as the white kids, he read through the encyclopedia, A to Z, studied almanacs, and challenged his teachers. When a middle-school administrator told him he couldn’t “court” white girls, he was undeterred. When someone spray-painted “Niggers Go Back” on their garage, he told the older boy next door, an acne-scarred white drag racer known as Big John, and they hunted down the perpetrators. Big John brought along a shotgun and blasted out the windows of the o
ther boys’ cars. J. R. grew big himself—six feet and two hundred pounds by the start of high school. He played basketball in the winter and tennis in the spring. But it was football he liked the most. The coach said they didn’t do race on their team; they relied on one another, and all that mattered on the squad was kicking the asses of the guys on the other side of the line. It seemed to J. R. that the entire town came out for Friday night games. There were Alumni Club pancake breakfasts and Sundays huddled in the dens of his teammates to watch the Bears.

  His sophomore year, J. R. was the starting running back. They called him Mac Attack, and he’d strut around in his letterman jacket. When he walked home after practice, still wearing his pads, people would call out greetings from passing cars, shouting that their nephews or neighbors’ sons were on the team, too. The players needed to keep a C average or higher, but J. R. was a member of the academic honor society. He aced the college boards, a 29 on the ACT, thinking he was destined for college ball. And although he gave weed and coke each a try, he believed that he needed to keep his body pure for sports. He’d explode on the heavy metal boys in their Megadeth T-shirts smoking in the school bathroom. “Don’t you know I’m a recovering asthmatic? Do you want me to have a bad game? Are you working for the other team?”

  J. R.’s older sister, Joyce, moved back to Cabrini-Green. Their father was still there, along with their mother’s sisters and cousins. On weekends, when there were no games and his mother was working, J. R. took the bus and train north to visit. His cousin Greg, known as G-Ball, ran with the Disciples in 1117 N. Cleveland, Dolores Wilson’s old high-rise, which residents now called the Castle. J. R. would hear from him accounts of Castle Crew friends and enemies killed, of being shot at or shooting someone else. Back in Dolton, J. R. would lie awake nights thinking about Joyce, imagining the danger that engulfed her in the projects.