High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  An hour into the Prairie Avenue takeover, Thomas Turner, refusing help, was still struggling to install the new lock on the front door. “Work smart, not hard,” Martha scoffed, as she lugged a window she’d found tossed in a closet. Thomas had rehabbed an abandoned single-family house a couple of blocks east, rebuilding the gutted bathrooms and kitchen. He bought used windows and doors or retrofitted what he could find, often carting home large parts on his bicycle. There were seven people living there now, including himself. “The homeless people love it,” he said. Formerly homeless himself, formerly incarcerated, formerly addicted to drugs, Thomas had stumbled onto the Occupy Wall Street encampment after his most recent jail stint and joined the growing movement. Through the downtown demonstrators, he hooked up with the Anti-Eviction Campaign, though J. R. had placed him on probation from the group earlier in the year. Thomas relapsed during the protests of the Chicago NATO summit in May 2012: activists crashing at his place invited him to share their drugs, and he’d accepted. But he was now clean and doing amazing work, J. R. said, proof that the home takeovers not only provided desperately needed housing but also put unemployed and underemployed people to work, training them in the building trades, all while beginning to stop the slide of a neighborhood.

  J. R. and Martha followed a maze of exposed wires from the kitchen down into the basement. No water tank down there, but no rats or roaches, either. Someone had jerry-built a bed of flattened cardboard boxes in the clammy recess beneath the basement stairs. Surrounding it were carton after empty carton of Newport cigarettes. Imitating the hawkers who prowled street corners trying to make a few bucks, J. R. shouted, “Loose squares!”

  At some point over the last century, the house’s second floor had been turned into a separate apartment. Its appliances were also gone, the bathroom, too, a demolition site. Thieves had hauled off a cast-iron radiator, and judging from the cracked rails on the banister and a collapsed step, had realized its heft and simply rolled it down the stairs. But the three bedrooms were largely undamaged. The unit’s thick wooden doors were adorned with what appeared to be their original glass handles. In the living room, the afternoon light poured in through floor-to-ceiling windows. The room contained a decorative fireplace and arched entranceways. The hardwood floor, still appearing relatively new after a hundred years, glistened. “The downstairs always be whoop whoop, and the upstairs always looks nicer,” J. R. said.

  Marveling at it all, he had a thought that often came to mind when he began work on one of these abandoned homes. He remembered Michael Jordan winning those six championships during the 1990s, saying to Bob Costas in the postgame interviews, “This one is special.” That’s what J. R. told himself as he bagged up the trash at the Prairie Avenue home. This is the one. This one can make a difference.

  18

  The Chicago Neighborhood of the Future

  THE LITTLE BRICK chapel, at the intersection of Clybourn and Larrabee, was built in 1901, an outpost of the American Protestant Episcopal Church in the industrial river community. In 1927, the Near North Side was mostly Italian, and Saint Philip Benizi, the parish church led by Father Luigi Giambastiani along Death Corner, bought the building and rededicated it the San Marcello Mission. Decades passed and Cabrini-Green’s twenty-three towers rose up around the chapel, the public housing population soaring to eighteen thousand and the Italians long departed. In 1965, the Saint Benizi Parish church was demolished, but the San Marcello Mission, in the shadows of several white William Green high-rises, continued on, with only a few dozen parishioners and a sole Sunday mass. The mission tried to serve the residents of the high-rises, offering job training and drug treatment. In 1972, a priest asked William Walker, the Chicago muralist, to paint the plain building. Walker covered the outside entrance with figures of different races, their giant circular faces overlapping like a Venn diagram and their hands joining in embrace. Bordering what was painted to look like a huge stained glass window, Walker included the words “Why were they crucified” and a list of those suffering: Jesus, Gandhi, Dr. King, Anne Frank, Emmett Till, Kent State. He titled the mural All of Mankind, Unity of the Human Race, and it reflected a hope for the close-quartered divisions of Cabrini-Green, Lincoln Park, Old Town, and the Gold Coast. The archdiocese of Chicago shut down the mission in 1974, and the building was taken over by the Northside Stanger’s Home Missionary Baptist Church.

  Four decades later, the neighborhood had transformed again. The Cabrini towers were no more, and the church sat in the backyard of the new multistory Target. The heavily trafficked streets were repaved and bike-laned. Up the block, an REI and a Crate and Barrel superstore had opened, an upscale movie theater and shopping center, an Apple Store and businesses for body sculpting. Where the Ogden Avenue Bridge had stood, there was now a skydiving facility, people paying $69.95 for a few minutes in a wind tunnel to experience the sensation of free fall. In 2015, Northside Stranger put its prime parcel of land on the market, asking $1.7 million for the 5,200-square-foot lot. In anticipation of a sale, the church was given a fresh coat of paint, the faded mural celebrating racial harmony whitewashed entirely.

  For years, developers referred to Cabrini-Green as the “hole in the donut,” the one area in the thriving city center where builders dared not go. No more. “Cabrini-Green is the Chicago neighborhood of the future,” a realty company wrote. Circling the Cabrini land were new condos and luxury towers with outdoor pools and spas. Next to where Dantrell Davis had lived, on Oak Street, townhomes with floor-to-ceiling windows sold before completion. Boxy Parkside mid-rises now lined both sides of Division Street. Cabrini-Green tenants had filed a lawsuit with the city in 2013 to reopen the 440 shuttered rowhouses as public housing units. The suit was settled in 2015, nineteen years after the first redevelopment plan for Cabrini-Green was proposed. The rowhouses would almost certainly be demolished. But public housing residents would be mixed into whatever replaced the buildings, filling 40 percent of the units. There was a good deal of city-owned Cabrini property that had yet to be developed—empty fields and concrete tracts still sat where many of the high-rises stood. Public housing units would also be sprinkled into the dense array of residential properties that was sure to come on the rest of the seventy acres.

  One Near North Side developer argued that the name Cabrini-Green no longer be uttered. “It’s ‘North of Chicago Avenue,’” he insisted. “NoCA is what everyone should be calling it. The name is without the stigma of Cabrini-Green.” Yet even Chicagoans drawn to a hot new housing market were loath to adopt a New York–style neologism. The Tribune editorial page appealed to its readers in 2015 to come up with a name for the former Cabrini-Green befitting local customs. Among the hundred-plus submissions were Cooley Park, Gautreaux Town, Gold Coast West, North Branch, Old Ogden, Severin, Newbrini, Montgomery, Brother Bill, and Seward Green. But by far the name suggested most was simply Cabrini. “And why not name the neighborhood after Mother Frances Cabrini?” the paper mused.

  “When I go to church now, I can hardly recognize the neighborhood,” Dolores Wilson said. “Condos, townhomes, wealth. It’s not the same.” Her church, Holy Family Lutheran, was still there but struggling amid the changes. Newcomers to the neighborhood flocked to places like Park Community, a multistory gospel-preaching nondenominational church built a couple of blocks away. Park Community was “committed to being in the city, for the city.” But Dolores appreciated that Holy Family was there at all. “People didn’t believe it would stand this long—being Lutheran and in Cabrini, too! But GOD IS GOOD ALL THE TIME,” she wrote in a letter to the editors of several local newspapers on the church’s fiftieth anniversary.

  With the motto “Many Voices. One Near North,” the Near North Unity Program was a new institution in the neighborhood that was also committed to the past. It was created at the start of the Plan for Transformation’s second decade to join together the changing area’s disparate populations—the remaining Cabrini-Green families, the newer homeowners and renters, the new busi
nesses, and the old community groups. Abu Ansari came over from his Parkside apartment for a time and led the meetings. “To assuage my guilt,” he said. Kelvin Cannon sometimes attended, standing in the back, and so did Carol Steele, one of Marion Stamps’s daughters, and Brother Jim.

  The group’s success in drawing out the neighborhood’s different “stakeholders” was evident in the ways their many voices often clashed. During one monthly meeting, white property owners peppered the area’s police commander with questions about the open-air drug sales they’d witnessed on Larrabee Street, not far from their condo building. They couldn’t believe that in the revived community, on the very same block as the new police headquarters, dealers could set up shop outside a corner store, with buyers loitering there at all hours of the day. A “Cabrini-Green problem” was being allowed to return, and they demanded that a cruiser be stationed at the intersection. Finally, a man who grew up in one of the Reds broke the protocol of raised hands and no interruptions. “It’s loosies!” he shouted. “They’re selling cigarettes on the corner, not drugs.” It didn’t make sense for someone buying drugs to linger. “You live in Cabrini-Green now,” he said. “In the good end.”

  The Near North Unity Program led race and culture workshops for its members, and it evolved into one of the chief arbiters of the community’s needs. The group set up a pen pal program among the fifth graders in the eight area schools, spread news of job openings and internships, organized hunger walks, and ran back-to-school fairs and neighborhood cleanups. It inaugurated a series of summer jazz concerts in the redesigned Seward Park. Anything to create “positive loitering” and “a new vision on Division,” its leaders said. It became such a presence that developers now sought the group’s support on proposed condo towers and revised plans for the Cabrini rowhouses. Jesse White brought architects out to a monthly gathering to talk about the designs for his new Jesse White Community Center, the thirty-thousand-square-foot facility built at a cost of $13 million on Chicago Avenue.

  The Near North Unity Program also joined the fight to save Manierre, the elementary school by the Evergreen Terrace apartments just north of Division Street. Like the other fifty-four schools that Mayor Emanuel’s administration said would be closed in 2013, Manierre was underenrolled, and the minority students who did attend underperformed by most measures. Jenner, south of Division, once the most crowded school in all of Chicago, had been rebuilt as part of the Plan for Transformation, and the state-of-the-art building could seat as many as a thousand students. But with the towers knocked down, enrollment hovered around two hundred, and two-thirds of those students were former Cabrini families who no longer lived in the district and traveled long distances each day.

  The city proposed a reallocation of resources, combining the students from both schools into the new Jenner. But the neighborhood objected, saying the Hatfield-McCoy conflict between the young people on either side of Division Street was real and endured. A group of Jenner girls responded to news of the possible merge by beating up a Manierre middle schooler. A Jenner boy posted a “hit list” on Facebook, implying that the nine Manierre students he’d identified would be shot. J. R. Fleming spoke at one of several public meetings to protest Manierre’s closing, asking Mayor Emanuel if, in Israel, he would be willing to send his children to a Palestinian school. He distributed copies of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, indicating that the city council was a signatory. “I would rather kill the budget than kill a child,” J. R. said. In May, the mayor’s office relented: Manierre could stay open. It was one of only a handful of the condemned schools to win a reprieve.

  In 2015, the Near North Unity Program turned its attention to Jenner and its ongoing underuse. The group suggested a merge not with another Cabrini-area school but with an elementary school less than a mile east, in one of the city’s wealthiest districts. Ogden International suffered from the opposite problem as Jenner. The Gold Coast area surrounding Ogden had exploded with new residential development in recent years, causing drastic overloading at the school. If Jenner and Ogden were combined, kindergarten through fourth grades could be housed at one campus and fifth through eighth at another. Not a single white family who’d moved to the Cabrini neighborhood had enrolled a child in all-black Jenner. But for those with infants or children-to-be, the possibility that one of the best schools in the city would, in effect, come to them was a kind of inner-city dream. Ogden parents who showed up at meetings to support the consolidation said they’d read the literature on school integration, and it revealed that higher-performing, wealthier students didn’t suffer academically in these mergers. They praised Jenner’s new principal, Robert Croston, a young alum of Harvard University’s School Leadership program. At Jenner, he’d initiated a campaign to improve daily attendance; he started a career day and family math nights. He was trying to reinforce a culture of success at the school by dubbing it the NEST, an acronym drawn from a school credo: “I am Neighborly. I stay Engaged. I am a Scholar. I use Teamwork.” And a great many people from both schools talked also of the social justice aspect of the merge. Nearly a century earlier, Harvey Zorbaugh had written in The Gold Coast and the Slum of these polar opposite communities that were only blocks apart: “All the phenomena characteristic of the city are clearly segregated and appear in exaggerated form.” Here, at last, was a chance to join together the extreme contrasts of the area, to level this imbalance. At a meeting to discuss a consolidation that would begin no sooner than September 2018, an Ogden parent said, “We’ve forgotten about taking care of other people’s children.”

  There was, as to be expected, a group of Ogden parents who were vocal in their opposition to the proposal. They worried about practical hurdles, like transportation between the two campuses. But they also felt that the Cabrini-Green neighborhood had changed, just not enough. “As Ogden parents we have been given virtually no chance to protect what we have planned for our kids’ future here,” a parent posted on an online forum. Someone else wrote, “I am all about the social development and upliftment of underprivileged kids and families, but it cannot come at the cost of compromising educational and behavioral and safety environment for all the other kids.” Cabrini families expressed their own concerns. Tara Stamps, a daughter of Marion Stamps and a longtime Jenner teacher, showed up at one of the meetings with several of her colleagues, all of them wearing “Straight Outta da NEST” T-shirts. She worried that the consolidation would not be a union of equals but a way to push out poor and black people. The neighborhood had already lost a high school and three elementaries as part of Cabrini-Green’s demolition. When the rest of the cleared site was finally developed, a third of the new units would be reserved for public housing families returning to their “native land.” Would a school filled with Gold Coast students now be closed to them? “I really want you to understand with a sensitivity that Cabrini-Green didn’t represent just buildings. Those were families. Those were communities,” Stamps said. “The reason you have scores of our young people coming back in treacherous weather is because they are rooted to the land. They have a blood memory there. Their grandparents and their aunts and their cousins and their favorite memories were there.”

  ANNIE RICKS

  ANNIE RICKS ENJOYED herself at the jazz concerts that the Near North Unity Program hosted in Seward Park a few Fridays each summer. “I saw my family and good friends. The music was good,” she said. She ducked into the field house to say hello to James Martin of the Slick Boys, the police officer known as Eddie Murphy who still worked a second job at the front desk; little children greeted him as “Mr. Murphy” as they entered the building. She shopped at the Target before heading home. Annie was living again at Wentworth Gardens. She called the company managing the property, demanding they repair the front door to her building and replace the lights in the parking lot. “It’s pitch dark out here. You all still playing with my life as well as my kids’ lives,” she complained. Sitting by her kitchen window, she counted thirteen li
ghts out. “It feels like I’m on house arrest,” she’d protest. “If I go out there, someone might sneak up and hit me in the head with a bottle.” Nothing was repaired for months, until a young man was shot in the courtyard, and then the CHA brought someone out to replace the bulbs.

  Annie decided she now wanted to leave Wentworth for Archer Courts, a rehabbed public housing complex in the city’s Chinatown. She liked the way the place looked. On the two seven-story high-rises there, the chain-link fencing along the open-air walkways had been removed and replaced with alternating clear and frosted glass panels. The ramps no longer felt like prisons; they were bright, colorful spaces where residents could look out at the Chicago skyline and at their children in the playground below. The architect who did the redesign, Peter Landon, had proposed preserving parts of Cabrini-Green as well, saving some of the red high-rises and surrounding them with townhomes. “That kind of building with infill around it could be interesting,” Landon said. “But there was no political will. You couldn’t come in with a proposal that was subtle. Oh well, maybe next time around.”

  Ricks took the bus to the CHA’s downtown offices. An official told her she could get on a waiting list for Archer Courts. Then over the next weeks and months, she documented every time she phoned the CHA to ask for an update. Eventually, an official suggested she try instead for Oakwood Shores, along the lakefront, and Ricks liked that idea, too. She had family there. She asked for the transfer. Expecting to move within a week, or maybe the week after that, she packed boxes and stacked them in her living room. She called the property manager at Oakwood Shores, telling her to get ready for Annie Ricks. Then another month passed, and she was still at Wentworth Gardens. Several months after the 2012 home invasion, Joe Peery, from Cabrini-Green, hooked her up with what Ricks called a “sweet lawyer.” They met at the supermarket across from the Parkside condos, Ricks handing all her paperwork to the attorney in a thick binder. “They think they playing with a fool,” she told him.