High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  Cannon knew some Cabrini families at Parkside who felt that the old public housing, for all of its faults, had been more hospitable. In their new mixed-income buildings, they had to undergo regular housekeeping checks, and there were fines for such things as riding a bike on the sidewalk or playing loud music from a car. There was a sense you could get in trouble just for being yourself. When anyone on a public housing lease did mess up, and he or she was arrested, even for a misdemeanor, even if the arrest didn’t lead to a conviction, the entire family could be evicted. Many times the CHA struck a deal with a leaseholder, saying she could stay only if the arrested family member was barred from ever setting foot in the apartment. You might have felt like you won the lottery when you got into Parkside, but now you had to choose between your daughter who was caught smoking weed and a roof over your head.

  In Cannon’s building, you’d smell weed coming from some of the condo owners’ apartments. They weren’t drug tested. They kept dogs and barbecued, but public housing families weren’t allowed to do either. Cannon didn’t want a dog himself, and he didn’t mind the drug tests or the inspections. He believed rules were necessary to keep order, and his market-rate neighbors had paid for certain privileges. Different laws for different tenants, though, didn’t do much for fostering “productive neighboring.” The public housing families in the new buildings weren’t allowed to form tenant councils. But the owners had their condo associations, and they set the rules that affected everyone.

  In any condo building in the city, owners were going to be wary of large numbers of renters; renters didn’t have savings tied up in the property and had no financial stake in the building’s future. That wariness was even greater at Parkside, since the renters paid only a small subsidized rent. Imagining himself an ambassador, Cannon took it upon himself to bridge that divide, greeting what he called his “European” neighbors. He’d say, “Good morning” and “Good evening.” Sometimes people ignored him, but if he saw them later in the Seward Park field house or the stores across Division Street, they smiled with a flash of recognition. That was a start. Occasionally people in the building responded by welcoming him to the neighborhood, not considering that they were new and he’d been there for close to fifty years.

  ANNIE RICKS

  IN NOVEMBER 2010, the woman from the Chicago Housing Authority phoned again, pleading, begging Annie Ricks to please move somewhere. She told Ricks it wasn’t safe to live alone like that in the projects. Fifteen stories, 134 units, the entire 1230 N. Burling building a pillar of darkness save for seven remaining families. At night the glow from the Rickses’ windows in apartment 1108 looked like the distant beacon of a lighthouse. With a laugh, Ricks told the official to let her be. She’d lived at Cabrini-Green for twenty-one years, and she was going to enjoy her Thanksgiving at home.

  “You have to find a new home, Ms. Ricks.”

  “No, I don’t. I can stay in 1230 N. Burling forever.”

  One of the tenant reps in the building told Ricks, “I’m not going until you go.” But then he left for the rowhouses. “He ran like a chicken with its head cut off,” Annie said. When the moving trucks came for the last seven families, only Ricks and a man on a lower floor refused to leave; then he relented, taking an apartment assigned to him.

  By that wintry fall, Cabrini-Green’s twenty-two other towers had each been shuttered. Ricks was the last tenant of all the Cabrini-Green high-rises. She was also the last remaining resident of any gallery-style public housing high-rise in Chicago. Every tower had been closed, tens of thousands of families packed up and moved elsewhere. She’d outlasted them all. At fifty-four, Ricks was a grandmother nearly forty times over. She’d lost all her teeth except for two on the bottom, and her black hair was streaked with white. “I’m the last woman standing!” she liked to proclaim.

  A CHA relocation specialist had taken Ricks to see Lawndale Gardens, not far from where she grew up on the West Side. But she had memories of coming home from Harrison High School and running from the Mexican and Puerto Rican students who threatened to beat her up. She didn’t want that for her children or grandchildren. She went to check out the Cabrini rowhouses as well. “Doesn’t this area seem right to you, Ms. Ricks?” a housing official asked her. It didn’t. Of the 600 homes there, just 150 of them, a sliver along Cambridge Avenue, had been rehabbed. The other 450 had been cleared of residents in 2008 and left to sit, even though the Plan for Transformation promised that the entire area would be fixed up and repopulated. Column after column of the barracks-style homes remained empty, their doors and first-floor windows covered in boards, their postage-stamp gardens gone to field, the perimeters blocked off with chain-link fencing, like some military outpost long after the soldiers left for home. Annie knew, too, that the boys in the rowhouses were warring with the young guys from the “orange doors,” the Evergreen Terrace apartments on Sedgwick, north of Division Street. Two of her former students had been shot on Cambridge.

  A pro bono lawyer suggested that Ricks agree to move into the best of the replacement homes being offered. But she decided she wouldn’t accept anything less than a four-bedroom apartment, which was what she was eligible for. She wasn’t illegal in her apartment. She paid her rent on time. No one caught her with drugs or guns. So how could the CHA just assign her a new apartment? There were six people on her lease: three of her children—Reggie, Rose, and Raqkown—two of her grandkids, and herself. For twenty years Ricks had lived in a four-bedroom in a neighboring high-rise, 660 W. Division. Then in 2008, when that building was about to be torn down, movers with the housing authority carried out all her belongings and set her up in 1230 N. Burling. In her Burling apartment, she had five bedrooms and a big living room, with a closet that fit an air mattress for whenever another family member needed to spend the night. She’d bought a brand-new washing machine from Home Depot less than a year before, thinking she’d be able to use it in her apartment for years to come. If she had to move, she wanted a unit that also had a washing machine hookup. “Why lie and say they don’t have a four-bedroom at the CHA?” she’d complain, citing a litany of dates and detailed conversations she’d had with housing officials. “I know they have a four-bedroom. They have so many four-bedrooms over there.” She cut herself short, a look of surprise giving way to a wide, closemouthed smile. “But I can’t never be mad.”

  Alone in 1230 N. Burling, she decided to turn the solitude into a celebration. In her apartment she cranked the music all the way up: “Power & Praise” on AM 1390. No one else was left in the building to complain. Her daughter Rose and several of her grandchildren jumped rope in the apartment. The younger ones hula-hooped and pogo-sticked. Ricks fired up the grill and barbecued on the open-air gallery. An icy gale sliced through the fencing, eleven stories high, but she repeated to anyone who would listen that she didn’t mind one bit.

  As much as Ricks professed her love of living alone in 1230 N. Burling, it took its toll. One Sunday she returned from church to find a river gushing outside her apartment. She grabbed a broom and attacked the water, whisking it off the ramp and elevator. She traced the source into the vacant apartment next to hers, the stream leading into one of the bathrooms. A bathtub had been stopped up, the taps turned on full blast. “Sabotage!” she cursed. Now they were trying to flood her out.

  And it wasn’t easy clambering up the stairwells, hiking those eleven stories. She wasn’t young like she used to be, and the elevators didn’t always work. The elevator was often broken in 660 W. Division. But there she lived on the fifth floor and could drop in and see family members on the way up. At 1230 N. Burling, nobody else was left to invite her in for a visit.

  On December 1, 2010, the CHA took Ricks to court, seeking an emergency injunction to close her building. The agency argued that it was not only absurd but also an undue financial burden to keep the heat on in a fifteen-story high-rise with just a single unit occupied. A federal judge agreed. Ricks had to leave within ten days. Annie said she would move if she coul
d go across the street, into Parkside of Old Town. But the housing authority deemed it unfair for the Ricks family to skip ahead of the many Cabrini residents on the Parkside waiting list. And maybe the agency considered Annie Ricks too obstinate, too intractable, for the delicate balance of mixed-income living.

  They gave her a unit seven miles south, in Wentworth Gardens, a low-rise public housing development of 422 units sandwiched between the fourteen lanes of the Dan Ryan Expressway and the fenced parking lots for the White Sox baseball stadium. When she’d toured Wentworth earlier that fall, she saw teenagers and young men selling drugs out in the open. She didn’t know these young men. At Cabrini, she had known all the boys who lingered outside her high-rise—she likely helped raise them in the after-school programs she ran or in the classrooms in which she worked as a teacher’s aide. She’d probably shared meals with them or their families. Her lawyer explained to the judge that Ricks was afraid to live at Wentworth Gardens. But the judge said drugs were being sold all over Chicago. That was that. “I had to go,” she’d concede. “Either that or be homeless.”

  On the morning of her move out of Cabrini-Green, December 9, 2010, Ricks rose early to take her bath. It was twenty-one years almost to the day since she’d walked there in a snowstorm. As she readied herself, Ricks pulled her hair back into a sprig of a ponytail. She put on a white collared shirt with gray stripes and a caramel-colored leather coat. Annie and her children had been up most of the night finishing the packing. On the way out of the building for the last time, Ricks stuck her head into the management office. Kenneth Hammond and a couple of other tenant representatives were in there. “Hey, y’all. I’m leaving,” she said. She passed by the building’s janitors gathered on the ground floor. Her new apartment in Wentworth Gardens didn’t have a laundry hookup. She’d given away her new washing machine to a janitor who’d looked out for her. He and his brother had already carted it off. “I’m-a miss you,” Ricks told him. “I’ll miss you, too,” he said.

  As it had the day she arrived at Cabrini-Green, snow had fallen. But this time the reporters really did show up to chronicle her move. They were there from ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, WGN, the Tribune, the Sun-Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. “An inglorious end to an infamous era,” as one of the newspapers put it. Another described Cabrini-Green as “the housing development that came to symbolize the squandered hope of them all.” The reporters jostled around the last high-rise tenants of what had been the city’s—and really the country’s, and the world’s—most iconic public housing complex. Rose Ricks, then seventeen, rolled a suitcase with a Route 66 sticker on it. She said, “I’ve been here basically my whole life. Like it’s hard leaving when you’ve got so much memories of it. You knew everyone. You felt safe.”

  Men from Big “O” Movers carried out most of the belongings, but Annie didn’t trust them with her most prized possessions. Her son Deonta lugged a cardboard box filled with the trophies he and his siblings had won for basketball tournaments and perfect attendance and the one that he took home for being valedictorian of the school that was still there just an empty field away. Schiller had been given a new name and a makeover, and it reopened the year before, serving only those students who tested in, ranking it among the best elementaries in the entire state. Children no longer walked a few hundred feet to get there but arrived by car and school bus. Deonta stopped outside the high-rise. He wanted people to understand that Cabrini-Green was more complicated than they thought. There was the myth of the place as something terrifying. You said you were from Cabrini-Green and people recoiled as if you had a deadly disease they might catch. But living at Cabrini, the Ricks family had experienced the fullness of it. They also had fun there. “There was more good than bad,” he tried to explain.

  When the trophies were stowed and the furniture loaded onto a truck, Annie Ricks ducked into a sedan the same off-white color as her high-rise. The car spun its wheels on the snow, gained traction, and she was gone.

  16

  They Came from the Projects

  THAT WAS DECEMBER 2010. By March, the last Cabrini tower had been stripped of every window, door, and cabinet. The steel curtains covering the ramps were yanked off and carted away. The fifteen-story high-rise looked exposed, like a giant dresser without any drawers. On a frigid evening, a hundred people huddled in the field below. They were gathered to commemorate the end—the demolition of 1230 N. Burling would begin in the morning. Behind the crowd, to the east, in the real estate running to the Gold Coast and Lake Michigan, the sunset played off the glass-and-steel towers; above them, the twilight passed through the skeleton of the Burling building.

  They could also see a man inside the tower, his movements revealed by the yellow vest he wore and the horn of light extending from his headlamp. There he was, alone in what might have been a friend’s apartment. And now he was on one of the upper floors, beneath ceiling fans sent whirling by the wind. His name was Jan Tichy, and he was a conceptual artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. On his commute to the Art Institute in recent years, he’d passed the “infamous” housing project, witnessing the late stages of its erasure. Tichy’s art tended to wrestle with architecture as a site of social and political conflict, and he proposed to the CHA a live art installation in the last Cabrini high-rise. It would be a way to memorialize the disappearing icon. To his surprise, officials at the agency loved the idea. For his Project Cabrini Green, Tichy partnered with local after-school programs, and their students contributed poems about the housing development. Jada Jones wrote in “Trapped,”

  What they called hell,

  We had named home.

  On the streets where children were once found,

  Transformed by evening to brutal battlegrounds

  That’s where we belonged.

  Tichy recorded the students reading their words, and he translated the syncopations of their voices into flashes of light, blinkering LED circuits that he placed inside 134 ammo boxes painted a bright orange—one box for each 1230 N. Burling apartment. Tichy planned for the lights to run on a loop throughout the thirty-day demolition, or until they were destroyed by the wrecking ball. All of this would be filmed from a camera set up on a balcony of one of the Parkside of Old Town apartments across Division Street. Dual images, along with audio of the children reading their poems, would play simultaneously on a website and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, just a mile east of the building.

  It seemed only fitting that the passing of high-rise Cabrini-Green would be turned into art and idea. The development had long existed in both its solid state of concrete and steel and in the vaster realm of abstraction, evoked as shorthand to convey a certain idea of the inner city. Just three weeks earlier, a prime-time network crime drama called The Chicago Code aired an episode it named “Cabrini-Green.” Ronin Gibbons, a character on the Fox series played by Delroy Lindo, is a Cabrini-Green native who has lifted himself up to become both alderman and syndicated crime boss. (The real-life alderman of the neighborhood, the Cabrini native with a bank robbery in his past, Walter Burnett, joked about any likeness: “You know that character grew up in Cabrini. It’s insulting. At least give me some kind of royalty.”) In voice-over, Gibbons describes his childhood at the Near North Side housing project, how people “deteriorated” along with the high-rises, personal squalor matching that of the physical environment. “I made it my mission to see that prison torn down,” he says, as the episode chronicles, with surprising accuracy, the many ways the city’s public housing went wrong—the lack of funding, the loss of rent-paying residents, the eighteen thousand people living on seventy acres, more than two-thirds of them children. The demolition of Cabrini-Green, Gibbons goes on, “showed me there was hope. Hope that a kid from the streets could rise up and be an instrument of change.” As we hear his soliloquy, we watch a murder that Gibbons has ordered on another black kid from the streets, someone who happened to cut into his profits. In the city’s churn, the war on anyt
hing considered blight, there are always going to be winners and losers. “Today is a great day,” the alderman declares. “The first day of a better Chicago.”

  Some of those at the vigil outside 1230 N. Burling that night shared the sentiment of the fictional alderman, believing that the event marked the end of a failed fifty-year public enterprise, a long-overdue exorcism of inner-city horrors. “This is really the final high-rise,” a CHA official who’d joined the ceremony announced triumphantly. “The legacy with the gallery-style public housing, it’s a final farewell.” Photographers for the National Public Housing Museum—which was still struggling to raise funds to open its museum of “stories” and “ideals” on the site of the former Jane Addams Homes a couple of miles south—were out there capturing the moment. So, too, were crew members from the Cabrini-Green documentary 70 Acres in Chicago. One of them lowered a boom mic in front of another CHA employee who was describing the deal the agency had struck that week with the retailer Target to build a 190,000-square-foot store on the site of the cleared William Green Homes. He said the Target would bring jobs to the Cabrini-Green residents who remained in the rowhouses and the surrounding mixed-income buildings. But many residents didn’t see the trade-off as a net gain. “People got dispersed for a Target?” a tenant leader asked, his voice going high pitched with incredulity. “All of this”—he swept his arms, taking in the expanse of empty land where thousands of people had lived—“for a Target?”

  As night fell, Jan Tichy was still moving through the tower, rechecking that the boxes housing the LEDs were fastened tightly to whatever secure things he could find in the stripped apartments—electrical outlets, light sockets, heating pipes. Most everything in the units had been removed, though traces of the lives spent there remained. A painting of a black dreadlocked Jesus. An elaborate mural of a giant Bugs Bunny alongside a wizardly Mickey Mouse and a whirling Tasmanian Devil, each of the characters holding blunts the size of their arms, their heads in clouds of smoke and eyes crenellated in red. In a bedroom, a single piece of white paper was still taped to the cinder block. It was a list scrawled in red marker, “The 7 Keys to Success”; among them, “Set and Achieve Goals,” “Make Wise Choices,” and “BE PERSISTENT.” In another apartment a green and gold mural covering an entire wall stated, “I NEED MONEY.”