by Ben Austen
Lane believed he was targeted because Mayor Daley saw him as a political threat. A few years after being ousted from the agency, he was convicted for making false statements on a loan application tied to the development of a South Side shopping center. For the violation, Lane’s lawyers said he deserved at most probation, since no one suffered a financial loss, but Lane received a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence. For many, the punishment seemed excessive. Lane certainly thought so: “Daley killed me off, period.”
Cabrini residents adapted, joining with others to evaluate the developers bidding on the redevelopment of the nine-acre site. In the meantime, the city went ahead and tore down 1117–1119 N. Cleveland—the home of the Castle Crew, the building Brother Bill frequented, and where Dolores Wilson and her family had lived when they came to Cabrini in 1956. The building had stood for thirty-nine years, and it was the first Cabrini-Green high-rise to be demolished. Its demise was cause for both celebration and reflection, hope and concern.
Then, suddenly, Cabrini residents who’d been involved in the redevelopment partnership for two years were shut out of meetings. They were told they’d be consulted in due time. Months passed. In June 1996, Mayor Daley made a public announcement about a revised development plan for the neighborhood that differed significantly from the previous one. Flanked by politicians and planners but notably no Cabrini-Green residents, he said eight Cabrini towers would now be demolished, not three. The rebuild would be much larger, spreading to other nearby plots of land, and would add 2,300 units of housing, in townhomes and three-flats, restoring the street grid and including new schools, a police station, a shopping center, and an expanded park. Just 15 percent of the units under Daley’s proposal would be available to very-low-income families, representing a net loss of nearly a thousand public housing homes. The plan seemed less like the redevelopment of the Cabrini Extension towers than a public-private push to accelerate gentrification in an area abutting the city center. “How can they take our roots from us without our input?” Dolores’s daughter Cheryl asked. “They’re planning to move the poor and destitute and build for rich folks.”
Five years earlier, in 1991, residents at the Henry Horner Homes had sued the CHA and HUD, accusing them of “de facto demolition”—allowing the vacancy rate to reach 50 percent and conditions to degrade so much that there was nothing left to do but tear down the buildings. In a 1995 settlement, the city was forced into a consent decree that dictated the terms of Horner’s redevelopment. At Cabrini, tenants had trusted that their city partners would hold up their side of an agreement. But at Horner, the city was bound by a court order. More than half of the units were reserved for very-low-income families. Demolition and construction were staggered, and residents never had to cope with an involuntary relocation.
So in 1996, Cabrini tenants sued as well. Twenty-two charges in all, accusing the Daley administration and the CHA of violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which made it illegal to use federal money to maintain racial segregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the US Housing Act, the Community Development Block Grant Agreement, and the HOPE VI statute. To the surprise of city government, a US district judge listened to testimony and in January 1997 ruled against the CHA’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. Eighteen of the twenty-two counts could go forward, and he issued an injunction halting further demolition at Cabrini-Green until the case was heard. It was a victory for tenants. “There is a God up above,” Cora Moore said.
DOLORES WILSON
BEFORE THE FILING of the lawsuit and even before the rehab of 1230 N. Burling was finished, Dolores Wilson decided to step down as president of her building’s management corporation. She was sixty-four in 1993 and tired. She’d been helping run her high-rise for more than a decade, and since Hubert’s death her calendar had been filled from one year to the next. When she announced her resignation, Bertha Gilkey persuaded her to stick around a little longer. “Just another month,” Gilkey urged, long enough to see through the repairs of the building’s roof. Then a month passed, and Gilkey asked her to wait until other construction contracts were signed. Then she needed Dolores to travel to Washington with her to speak to lawmakers about resident management. Dolores knew she had trouble saying no. Her pastor would ask her to go somewhere, and what could she do? She’d go. Finally, Dolores was allowed to hand off the presidency to one of her neighbors.
She left the water department around the same time. The city was offering early retirement, and after twenty-seven years at the job, Dolores took it. The head of microscopy was from Bulgaria, and to Dolores she sounded just like Zsa Zsa Gabor. “This is your day, Dolores. Stop filing papers. Come here,” she said. She led Dolores to a long table at the department covered with food, and people from all the laboratories came by to wish her farewell. That was a week or two before Michael Jordan’s father was killed. For years to come, that’s how Dolores would place the date, because she sent the Bulls star a sympathy card, and he sent her a thank-you in return. She’d gathered all the children in the Burling building to write condolences as well. She told them not to beg Jordan for anything, just to write that they were very sorry to hear about his daddy. But one of them asked for a bike. That boy used to break the wings off pigeons, and Dolores told his stepfather that children who were allowed to torture little animals would get the feeling of death in them. Eventually, it wouldn’t mean anything to the child to cripple or kill a person. That’s how Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee cannibal, got started, she explained. But the boy later became a preacher. “Good things can come out of bad, I guess,” Dolores said. “I think at least I saved some animal lives.”
Dolores had a harder time recalling exactly when her own Michael, her second child, died. “Some things you just can’t . . .” She tried not to think about his death, but guessed it happened two years earlier, maybe in 1991. Mike was almost forty then and divorced. He had four children and was also raising his girlfriend’s two as his own. He was with the girlfriend on a summer night, at a Chicago Avenue sandwich shop by the rowhouses. He went to buy cigarettes at a gas station on Orleans, and when he returned a guy who used to date his girlfriend was threatening her, saying he’d bash her head in with a bottle. “One thing about my sons,” Dolores would say, with a mix of pride and sorrow, “they protect their women. They’re gallant.” The two men came to blows, and Mike ended up on top. That’s when one of the ex-boyfriend’s associates pulled out a gun and shot Michael in the back, close range, with a hollow-point bullet.
It seemed utterly unfair to Dolores. She had dedicated much of her life to the community and the neighborhood children. She’d received service awards from her church and the YMCA. The district police had honored her and Sugar Ray Dinke on the same day. Jack Kemp had personally named her the HUD “Resident of the Year.” All that, and look what happened to her own baby. Michael’s children were left fatherless. In her grief, Dolores wanted to be left alone, but the visitors kept coming. She said little in front of them, even joked, but then she’d close herself in the bathroom and scream. Someone had to explain to her what a hollow-point bullet was, how it expanded as it traveled inside the body. Hearing that made her think differently about people.
One of the members of her church had a twenty-five-year-old daughter who’d gone missing for three months a couple of years earlier. The police refused to look for her, saying, “You sure she’s not laid up with someone?” The daughter had been murdered it turned out, her body left to decay in a sewer two blocks away. The woman had a son as well who’d been shot in the back behind one of the Cabrini high-rises. That mother said to Dolores, “Ms. Wilson, you always told me to keep the faith. Now you have to keep the faith.” The pastor from Holy Family counseled Dolores, saying she was the most forgiving person he’d ever known.
At the funeral service, Dolores stood in front of the congregation and said she didn’t want any retaliation. She asked that Michael’s friends and other folks from the building pass along that message. She attended the trial, and
when the ex-boyfriend was found not guilty she hugged and kissed his mother, telling her she knew he didn’t do the killing. She felt less compassion for the shooter. He was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to seven years. Dolores’s youngest son, Kenny, had broken into a car trunk once and stolen a few tools and received the same sentence. “There’s no justice,” she would say. “A gangbanger got seven years for killing my son, and Kenny got seven years for stealing a damn screwdriver and wrench.”
Dolores had been hosting family reunions in Lincoln Park every August for a decade, but she stopped after Michael was murdered. Sometimes she wished her children had moved away, had left Chicago and stayed in Indiana or another place. But she didn’t blame Cabrini-Green. She didn’t imagine her children would have lived a better life elsewhere. A reporter who interviewed her three days after Michael’s funeral asked if there was anything she wanted to convey to outsiders about her home. Dolores paused to think. She guessed she did have a message: “Tell them that there’s more love over here than terrorizing.”
13
If Not Here . . . Where?
KELVIN CANNON
KELVIN CANNON GOT off the elevator one morning, on his way out of the building, and Cora Moore blocked his path. When he was a boy, living next door in 714 W. Division, Moore often scolded him for fighting with the children in her high-rise. He was now twenty-six, and she still reprimanded him—she was in charge of resident security at 1230 N. Burling, and he called it for the Gangster Disciples there.
“You should get on my team,” Cora began that morning in 1989. “Do you want to be out here and be free and raise your family? Then you have to leave gangbanging alone.” She’d been delivering the same pitch for a couple of years, trying to recruit him away from the gang. “What I’m offering they can’t offer you. I’m offering a chance at a better way of life.” Cannon lingered in the lobby longer than usual. He’d been wondering lately whether there were other options available to someone like him, thinking that probably there were none. He’d managed to avoid a return to the penitentiary, but he was tired of the police raids, of going back and forth to jail for weeks at a time.
Cora, sensing the opening, told Kelvin that he was smarter than most. She said the building’s resident management was getting started and he could be one of its leaders. He could work right there in the high-rise. Like Bo John had made him believe when he was thirteen, Moore said he could be part of something bigger than himself. “If you really want to change, help me fix the building,” she told him. “Let me show you the other side of life.”
“Okay,” he said. “Show me.”
Cannon went to the leaders of the Disciples and said he was resigning his position. Moore talked to the commander at the police precinct and said Cannon was now working under her. She signed him up for a security guard class. In prison, he had read the Bible—first the New Testament and then the Old—and he continued to school himself after his release, looking at a dictionary in his apartment, working on his vocabulary and spelling. But he hadn’t been in a classroom since he was kicked out of Cooley High. He completed the security guard program, and in his uniform and cap he monitored the stairwells and ramps of his high-rise. Some thought it hypocritical that after all Cannon had done he was telling eight-year-olds to stop fooling around on the elevators and directing young men to move from in front of the building. But he said he’d always been in charge of people at Cabrini-Green and giving orders in one form or another. He was only doing more of the same. “You turned police?” a guy from the building asked him. “Nah, my brother. I’m trying a new way of life.”
He was one of the few men to go through the resident management classes with Bertha Gilkey. On the weekend retreats, he sang “We Shall Overcome” with Dolores Wilson and everyone else, and he studied budgeting and federal housing regulations. He went along on the trips to see other tenant-managed housing complexes in Boston, DC, and St. Louis. Like Dolores, he came to know politicians personally. “I haven’t forgotten my pledge to be your ‘bridge’ to HUD and the City of Chicago,” the secretary of housing wrote in a note, asking about the well-being of Cannon’s wife and signing it, “old #15, Jack Kemp, your friend.” Moore used her connections to get Cannon into a training course for CHA janitors. He apprenticed at Cabrini-Green, shadowing the electricians, carpenters, glaziers, and locksmiths. He did masonry and bricklaying, whatever the buildings needed. For two years, he took night classes at a trade school. After graduating, he started off at $11 an hour, but when he was put in charge of the janitors in 1230 N. Burling, as a union worker, his pay jumped to $17,000 a year. That was good money, in all senses. He earned it as a day in, day out laboring professional, on call twenty-four hours a day. He barely left the high-rise, and he’d become more like Hubert Wilson, Dolores’s husband, than his old self. He joined a church and trained to be a deacon.
Cannon took pride in his high-rise’s improvements. “It looked better than any other building in Chicago that was public housing,” he’d brag. “You know how in that Ajax commercial, they go past certain houses that are all grimy and filthy. Then they come to the one real clean house—it’s spotless. The music stops and a woman says, ‘Ajax was here.’ That was our building—like Ajax had been there.”
J. R. FLEMING
WHEN J. R. was arrested for selling drugs on the far North Side, it was Jesse White who picked up the phone, telling the prosecutor that he vouched for the young man. “Jesse White took me under his wing,” J. R. said. As part of the Young Democrats of Cook County, J. R. helped out whenever the ward boss, George Dunne, hosted a community event or when White needed guys to pass out turkeys or school supplies. In the procession at the annual Bud Billiken Parade across the South Side, he carried the banner of the ward organization. And come election time, he hung campaign posters, tore down those of the opposition, and ushered Cabrini residents to the polls. “I was being raised politically,” J. R. explained. One time, the pastor at Holy Family asked J. R. if he could get his bosses to fix the sidewalk in front of the church. He brought it up, and the sidewalk was repaved. “It was an awakening,” J. R. recalled. “Politics is a means to an end. My power got that done. It felt great.”
Men ran the ward. Women, for the most part, ran Cabrini-Green. Marion Stamps cornered J. R. one day at a neighborhood youth center. “Don’t be a puppet’s puppet,” she warned him. “There’s always a master pulling both of your strings.” She ran again for alderman in 1995, reminding voters that she’d orchestrated the gang truce and railing against the plans to tear down sections of Cabrini-Green. She called it a tragedy that “revitalization” meant moving in white and wealthier residents and moving out the neighborhood’s longtime inhabitants. “It’s no accident that they pieced together this ward with little pockets of black people that they intend to make disappear. It’s all about displacement and reclaiming of the land,” she said. “If they come at Cabrini in the daytime, they’re going to come after the rest of them at night. And that’s not only public housing; that’s any housing that’s available for poor people.”
Her chief opponent in the race was J. R.’s immediate supervisor in the ward office, the chairman of the Young Democrats, Walter Burnett, who as a young man in the Cabrini rowhouses was an accomplice in a bank robbery and served some jail time. After his release, Burnett went to work for the ward organization and was mentored by Jesse White before rising through the local patronage system. He had the power brokers on his side; J. R. was one soldier in a small army of campaign workers they commanded. Burnett won easily, and Stamps decided to leave the Cabrini-Green area and move back to her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. Her father was still living there, and she saw a fitting symmetry in attaining political office where her activism began. But at the age of fifty-one, before she’d packed a single bag, Stamps died of a heart attack in her sleep. “Stress killed her,” her daughter Guana said.
About a year after Burnett’s election, J. R. decided to get out of politics altoget
her. He had worked what he called slave hours for six straight days setting up for the 1996 Democratic National Convention. By pulling off the event without a hitch, the second Mayor Daley would simultaneously match his father as political kingmaker, helping launch Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign, and surpass him by avoiding the chaos that ensued on the streets and in the convention hall a generation before. Twenty-eight years earlier, when Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff used his nominating speech to denounce the “Gestapo tactics” of the Chicago police then beating up protestors in Lincoln Park, people observing the first Mayor Daley said he yelled, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!” (Daley Sr. said he never in his life used such language. “Faker” was what his supporters said he shouted.)
In 1968, Chicago had used tall fencing to mask the bleakness of the old stockyard neighborhood surrounding the convention center. The 1996 convention took place in the United Center, the new home of the Bulls and Blackhawks, completed just west of the Loop two years earlier, at a cost of $175 million. Daley’s vision for the city was inspired by his trips to Paris: Chicago as a postindustrial urban gem, a global city, and a central tourist attraction. Here was an opportunity to showcase the revitalized Chicago he was creating, a city once again on the make. Several of the Horner high-rises across from the United Center were demolished. The city covered nearby vacant lots with wood chips and newly planted bushes. Owners of parking lots and other properties in the vicinity were pressured to put up wrought iron fencing and planter boxes. Roads were repaved and lined with antique-style streetlamps and hanging flower baskets. Bridges were painted, the exteriors of nearby schools restored, street signs added, and the train running west from the Loop over Lake Street reopened. And like in Paris, the office buildings in the Loop were lit up at night.