By Ron Grossman And Charles Leroux
Tribune staff reporters
January 29, 2006
IN A PART OF CHICAGO you may never have heard of. In a neighborhood where, only a dozen or so years ago, crushing poverty and vicious gangs had their heels on the throat of a dying community. Where, in a several block area, only five buildings were left standing, and three of them were drug houses. Where the wind off the lake blew through vacant lots stripped of homes and lights and life and hope. There, in the last place you'd expect, a neighborhood has been reborn with a speed and success perhaps unprecedented elsewhere in America.
The resurrection of North Kenwood/Oakland-bounded by 35th Street, 47th Street, Cottage Grove Avenue and the Metra tracks along the lakefront-is most obviously seen in galloping development and skyrocketing property values.
Just a few years ago, North Kenwood/Oakland wasn't mentioned in real-estate sales brochures. Today, Realtors solicit homeowners with eager offers for their property. Cars pass slowly through the community on
Sundays, a parade of those hoping to buy into the vision of residents who had the fortitude to withstand some very lean years.
Littered vacant lots, once the very emblem of the neighborhood's desolation, have turned to gold. Those not already sprouting town houses and condominiums are stacked with the bricks and lumber that soon will become homes bearing price tags edging up toward those in trendy North Side areas. Construction crews clamber up and down the scaffolding that envelops long-boarded-up buildings, like giant picture frames for a near-miraculous inner-city success story.
The North Kenwood/Oakland community is a boomtown with its feet on the ground and its eyes wide open. Victorian-era brownstones are being lovingly restored to their former glory. Some of those yesteryear gems-testaments to the neighborhood's affluent past-are flanked by recent construction, carefully tailored to maintain the architectural continuity of a block. A community housing committee vets blueprints to assure visual respect for the neighborhood's history-an aesthetic sensitivity rare elsewhere in the city.
Formerly a dumping ground for the poor, North Kenwood/Oakland is becoming a mixed-race, mixed-income community. Residents are still primarily African-American, many now with solidly middle-class incomes. But Asian families are buying in the neighborhood too. So are white homebuyers moving north from the nearby Hyde Park neighborhood, which hosts the University of Chicago campus.
That human rainbow echoes a quality that caught Everett Chamberlain's eye when he surveyed the neighborhood in his 1874 book "Chicago and Its Suburbs." "Kenwood," he observed, "is the Lake Forest of the South, without the exclusiveness of its northern rival."
As drug trafficking, street crime and other negatives have ebbed in the community, its focus has shifted from cleaning out bad elements to bringing in beneficial ones. Elementary schools are being created. Security patrols have increased. On 47th Street, Little Black Pearl Workshop, a fine-arts education center, has taken residence in a new, architecturally innovative $9 million structure built where a notoriously unruly liquor store once stood.
The Quad Communities Development Corporation, of which North Kenwood/Oakland is a part, has commissioned market research that shows a rich potential for retail shopping in an area from which hardware stores, grocers and gas stations largely had fled.
The gaps left as stores and homes vanished would prove to be the neighborhood's salvation. But to realize the potential in that urban soil-bank, leadership had to step forward from the community, people dedicated to putting control of North Kenwood/Oakland's fate into residents' hands. We will meet some of them in the next two weeks. The real building blocks of change here have been people-survivors and pioneers, leaders and bandwagon jumpers, prophets and profit-takers. All played roles in restoring a lost neighborhood to a city long defined as a place of neighborhoods.
The rebirthing of North Kenwood/Oakland was announced with a bang, then another and another and another.
On Dec. 12, 1998, some 1,200 mostly local people gathered along the railway tracks near 41st Street and Lake Park Avenue. A smaller cluster looked on from the third floor of Robinson Elementary School a block south. One woman who had moved out of the community long before took a cab back to see it with her own eyes.
As if witnessing a space shuttle launch, the crowd chanted the countdown: "Three, two, one, zero!" With a series of blasts spectators could feel drumming against their chests, the Lakefront Properties, four 16-story Chicago Housing Authority buildings, imploded. One after another, they seemed to melt into their own foundations. A dust cloud rose, blowing toward the lake-the opposite direction from that predicted. Spectators ran coughing and blinking their eyes.
As the dust began to settle, people clapped and cheered. Someone passed a bottle around. The event was applauded then and is remembered now because, for the preceding half century, the neighborhood's destiny was tied to housing policies set miles away in City Hall and Washington, D.C. For many residents, the blasts signaled a release from those shackles, a long-sought freedom for the community to shape its own future.
The implosions lasted only minutes but remain imprinted in residents' minds as a before-and-after marker as stark as B.C. and A.D. are in the Christian calendar. Residents commonly refer to events as "before the high-rises came down" or "after they were gone."
Those four buildings, plus other, more massive CHA projects to the north and west, had closed off North Kenwood/Oakland on three sides, hiding its real estate potential, which was, in the classic broker mantra, location, location, location. The neighborhood fronts on Lake Michigan and has dramatic views of the downtown skyline a few miles north, the same set of pluses that, on the North Side, long have made Gold Coast addresses so prized.
Rev. Jesse Jackson was among those who watched the buildings fall. "These were an attempt, under the earlier Daley administration, to build political wards-not housing," he said.
Toni Preckwinkle, a community activist then, the neighborhood's alderman now, saluted what she called "the tearing down of the high-rises that have cast a shadow on North Kenwood/Oakland for so long."
"It had to come down," said Gladyse Taylor, who had come over to witness the event from her nearby home. "It squeezed the life out of the neighborhood."
WHEN THOSE CONCRETE curtains fell, the community thus revealed was an unlikely combination of elegant old homes and weed-choked empty lots.
The former stand as monuments to what was, around 120 years ago, an attractive suburb populated by upper-class white families, some of them members of Chicago's social elite. Their homes were faced with stone and graced by the handiwork of artisans in marble, stained glass and copper. Life inside those buildings was good-some had dumbwaiters and libraries and upstairs ballrooms-and the crystal, silver and guests sparkled.
Period photos show Drexel Boulevard with a narrow, park-like center strip featuring curving pathways. At Drexel and Oakwood Boulevard, there was a small circular park with a large planted urn at its center surrounded by gracefully sculpted plantings. Along such promenades, women strolled in long, lacy white dresses while pushing big-wheeled, basket-like prams. The men dressed in suits and wore hats.
The lawyers, businessmen and politicians who commuted from the neighborhood to their downtown offices, first by horse car and then, after 1882, cable car originating at 39th Street, passed through other South Side neighborhoods where there were increasing pockets of poor and working-class black families. To the west, a long, narrow "Black Belt" of African-Americans developed along State Street.
By 1910, white families in North Kenwood/Oakland were heading north, many to the newly trendy Gold Coast. The vacuum was filled by poor whites and, increasingly, African-Americans escaping overcrowded ghettos north and west. They moved into rented apartments in once-stately homes that had been converted on the fringes of the community.
In Oakland, the northern half of the neighborhood, 17 percent of the population was black in 1920. By 1930, that percentage had risen to 28.9, while, due to white flight, the total population had declined. There were immigrants there as well-mostly English, Irish, German and Canadian, with a small community of Japanese-Americans living along a five-block strip of Lake Park Avenue.
By 1940, Oakland's total population had fallen further, even while new transportation lines lured Southern whites and white stockyard workers from the "Packingtown" area to the west to come into the community.
Some residents were concerned enough about economic, social and racial changes that the Oakland-Kenwood Property Owners Association called a Town Hall meeting on a Monday night in May, 1941. The Chicago Historical Society has the flier for the meeting, which notes among topics to be discussed: more police patrols, more attention paid to drug-related crime, a crackdown on "sneak conversions" from single-family homes to apartments, and other problems "that threaten slums for Oakland-Kenwood."
By the mid-1950s, concern over poor people coming into the neighborhood had some longtime residents feeling backed into a corner. Mrs. Albion Headburg was a socialite who lived in an apartment building in Kenwood that had belonged to her parents. A Tribune reporter from that time who spoke with her noted that Headburg's "second floor balcony amounts to a box seat at the drama of change in the area."
Headburg didn't like what she saw.
She told the reporter: "The Constitution should still guarantee us the right to choose our neighbors. When a group selects an area, pays for it, develops it, I think they should have some rights in it."
By 1960, any debate about who had rights to the neighborhood was merely academic. More than 98 percent of Oakland had become poor and black, with people living in converted apartments, kitchenettes, crowded slum dwellings and public housing projects.
As property there and south to 47th Street descended toward worthlessness, houses were abandoned. Many were demolished, leading to further reductions in housing stock and thus population, and the proliferation of what would become the icon of a failed community-lot after lot where there was nothing left that anyone wanted.
The front steps of William Williams' 109-year-old, stone-faced, Italianate mansion, kitty-corner from Gladyse Taylor's house across the street, are broken and hard to climb. A van driven by a man impaired by drink and drugs rolled up those steps in 2003 and killed a girl who was sitting there. An angry mob soon gathered, and some of the men beat the van's driver and passenger to death.
"Wouldn't have happened if I'd been there," Williams says. As a witness to the roller-coaster ups and downs of North Kenwood/Oakland across more than five decades, he exudes a sense of calm and stability.
A small, dignified man of 93, he stands in his front parlor, framed by the tall ceilings with ornate plaster moldings, the stained glass windows and the dark hardwood wainscoting that graced many of the community's homes in its glory days. In a home large enough to once have hosted lavish, fancy-dress parties, the quiet now is interrupted only by the footsteps of a great-granddaughter somewhere upstairs and-upon the entry of strangers-the barking complaint of an elderly dog named Skittle.
Williams recalls that, six decades ago, he couldn't have owned a home in that part of the neighborhood or even stayed there overnight. If he were seen on the streets during the day, he'd be challenged as to what he was doing there.
"The only black people you saw coming [east] across Drexel Boulevard then were service ladies doing cleaning work for the day or guys shoveling coal," Williams says. "Otherwise the police would stop you."
Williams moved into the neighborhood in the early '50s as the white exodus accelerated, and landlords began to rent to blacks. Compared with the overcrowded ghetto, it was paradise.
"Everything was here," he says, obviously delighting in mentally re-creating the neighborhood as it was in its black heyday.
"There were stores of all kinds on 47th and on Cottage Grove-five and ten cent stores, hardware stores, hotels, bakeries," he says. "There was a movie theater, the Oakland, at 39th and Drexel. The only thing you had to go downtown for was first-run movies."
When he first moved to the area, Williams, who had been born in Morgan City, Miss., lived in a rooming house, one of two formerly stately homes that stood side-by-side at 3974 and 3976 Lake Park Ave. They were owned by Lillie Barrow Brooks, the mother of heavyweight boxing champ Joe Louis.
The white exodus from the neighborhood gave Williams an unexpected opportunity. In 1971, a woman living a little further south on Lake Park Avenue was worried about the house next door. She knew the oil tank had been filled just before the lady who had lived there died, leaving the building vacant and, in a declining neighborhood, unwanted. With vandalism and arson on the rise in the area, she couldn't sleep thinking about that full tank. She wanted someone in there and turned to Williams.
He was a janitor at the Nortown and Will Rogers movie theaters on the North Side and didn't have a lot of money, but he mustered help from family members and, for $2,000, bought the place. Now, in the museum-like silence inside, it's easy to hold the illusion that the era of the neighborhood's old elite still lives.
Outside though, his block clearly shows the neighborhood's still-open wounds. Just four houses remain. Among the missing are Brooks' rooming houses. Left in their wake are vacant lots, where an occasional stray dog noses through the rubble.
In the '50s, black flight had followed white flight. Williams remembers Louis's mother trying to staunch the exodus. "She sat on the front porch and begged people not to move, but it was too late."
It was too late because decline was no longer just a physical condition, but a psychological burden. The neighborhood was solidified as a ghetto when people, inside and out of the area, labeled it as such-a place where nobody invests, nobody shops, a place thought of as closed, shuttered, the lights out.
Williams shrugs and sums up the community's nadir: "You don't want to be a neighborhood known as a ghetto."
The CHA monoliths were not alone in walling off North Kenwood/Oakland physically, thus sealing its fate as a ghetto. A not-so-obvious but nonetheless effective wall was created at the neighborhood's southern border along 47th Street.
In the 1950s, upper-middle-class white homeowners south of 47th in Kenwood, noting racial change and an influx of poverty to the north, subtly seceded. They assigned a new name, "North Kenwood," to the area between 47th and 43rd and appropriated "Kenwood" to apply solely to their more affluent and largely intact neighborhood.
The secession was more than in name only. Neighborhood groups in Kenwood supported the building of a tennis club stretching along the south side of 47th. The club faced away from the street as if turning its back and served as a physical divide between the two Kenwoods.
Those who found themselves living in what was now "North" Kenwood were not consulted about the changes. They had become thought of as those for whom decisions would be made.
The world-renowned University of Chicago, whose tranquil, gargoyle-and-turret-embellished campus lay adjacent to Kenwood in Hyde Park, was feeling similarly under siege as it watched nearby neighborhoods decline into crime-ridden slums. Fearing for its life, the school briefly considered packing up and moving to California.
Ultimately the U. of C., Hyde Park and the secessionist Kenwood allied themselves with Mayor Richard J. Daley, the current mayor's father, to create a plan that would shore up their interests. The Hyde Park/Kenwood redevelopment plan, bearing the cachet of approval from a noted university, was hailed nationally as a pioneering effort.
The geography and financing of that redevelopment plan stopped abruptly-and pointedly-at 47th Street. That also was the boundary where squad cars of the university's police, which had begun to patrol beyond the campus into Hyde Park and Kenwood, turned around.
The decision to abandon troubled neighborhoods would haunt the university for decades, giving the school the reputation of an insensitive and imperious neighbor.
Outgoing President Don Michael Randel, who has done much to reverse that reputation, allowed that, in the '50s and '60s, "The university raised the drawbridges and turned inward."
Ald. Preckwinkle, a U. of C. graduate whose 4th Ward includes both Kenwoods, says, "The university drew a line in the sand between the saved and damned."
On the "damned" side of that line lay North Kenwood/Oakland, hidden from the outside world and seemingly fixed as a place of unfulfilled lives, a future lacking hope.
For 11 years, from 1969 to 1980, not one new building went up. In the following eight years, housing construction resumed with 246 new units. During that span of time, however, more than twice as many units, 531 of them, were knocked down, raising the number of vacant lots while the population dropped 35 percent.
By 1990, the Oakland half of North Kenwood/Oakland led the city in several discouraging statistics-lowest family income, highest unemployment percentage, most families living below the poverty line-the sort of statistics that lead to crime.
"Gangs and drugs became the way of life here," says Gladyse Taylor, who, with her husband, bought in during that era.
Phil Kaplan, 64, has seen the good times for retail in the neighborhood and survived the not-so-good.
The neon signs on the front of his store, Chicago Furniture, on Cottage Grove near 43rd, proclaim: "No Finer Company To Deal With. Friendly Credit." Kaplan's is one of only a few (count them on two hands) commercial establishments left in the community and is, technically, outside of the neighborhood's western boundary as it sits on the west side of Cottage Grove.
Kaplan presides over the location as his father, Harry, and Russian immigrant grandfather, Adolph, had before him, dating to 1916, just when the great flow of Southern blacks to Chicago was beginning. Inside and out, the building seems encapsulated from change. The centerpiece of the store is a well-worn cashier's booth, where generations of customers have lined up to make weekly payments on bedroom sets and kitchen tables.
"If I tried to tell you how many times that cash drawer has opened and closed to make change," he says, warming to the story, "you couldn't count them in a lifetime."
Like his forebears, Kaplan is an adapter. When the neighborhood was becoming dominantly African-American, the store sponsored Al Benson, one of Chicago's first and most popular black radio hosts.
When Benson was asked how often he would plug the store on his broadcasts, he said, "As much as you like, you're my only sponsor."
A huge photo of "The Old Spinmaster," as Benson came to be known, still looks down on customers even as Kaplan prepares to modernize the store to make it attractive to newer, more affluent residents. The stoves and refrigerators that once were staples of his business now are bought by condo developers from big-box stores. Like a nimble running back, Kaplan has quickly shifted direction and now sells home-entertainment centers.
Despite the modernizing, the cashier's cage remains, a monument to Kaplan's lineage, to his salesman's joy in deal-making and the human interaction it entails. It's also a historic artifact of the commercial life of the area, currently just a memory.
There used to be four other furniture stores along the block-Ace, Ember, Grove and National. Manufacturers' reps could park on the street and walk from store to store taking orders. Kaplan traces the business community's decline to 1968, when mobs, incensed by the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, burned and looted stores.
"Our competitors were damaged both emotionally and physically," Kaplan said. He has worked at the store since he was 10, and his loyalty to the family business and to its African-American customers-whom he knew so well that their children's drawings decorated the entire back wall of the place-kept him behind the counter as other shops boarded up.
"By the '80s," he said, "everyone else was gone."
WHEN THE CHA high-rises that formed NKO's eastern border were imploded in 1998, the life had already been out of them for more than a decade. Residents were removed in 1985, having been promised that their displacement was temporary and told that it was for their own good. The dilapidated buildings would be renovated, and people could return to nicer apartments.
But while the Lakefront Properties sat vacant, the concept of massive housing projects was rethought. Courts, academics and legislators increasingly saw those projects not as a solution to endemic poverty, but an institutionalization of it.
The thinking that emerged eschewed the moving of poor people back into renovated CHA high-rises in favor of offering them subsidized housing in mixed-income neighborhoods, the idea being to blend them into the mainstream life of the community instead of stacking them in towers of despair.
But it became clear that, in order to have a community in which poor, working-class and affluent lived side by side, only a percentage of the former CHA tenants could be provided for in new housing.
Those not accommodated in the renewing North Kenwood/Oakland-and there were many-were dropped from the community's ongoing story and largely left to fend for themselves. No one knows exactly where they went.
"People who lived here for years have become invisible," says Brian Malone, an organizer with the Kenwood/Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), a group that speaks for the poor. "They're paying for the boom."
Gladyse Taylor settles into the couch in the living room of her newly renovated Victorian home. As she talks, the hum of nearby earthmoving equipment and the rhythmic bang of hammers on plywood could be heard, the current theme music of the neighborhood where she was born.
"I was born at Ida Wells," Taylor, 50, says with no lingering trace of the shame that once would have accompanied the admission of being a child of public housing.
The Ida B. Wells homes are mostly empty now. What's left of them-including 751 E. 37th Pl., her old address-sit just five blocks northwest of Taylor's house.
Out of her front window, she can see six upscale townhomes rising diagonally across the street where "The Fort," the headquarters of the notorious drug-dealing street gang, the El Rukns, once stood in a converted movie theater. Sidewalks where the Rukns used to patrol their turf with menacing dogs now lead past neatly maintained front yards, the grass clipped, the shrubs shaped.
Taylor fought for her house, standing fast in the face of repeatedly being warned to leave the neighborhood.
"People say I'm headstrong," she says. "I guess I get that from my grandmother." She gestures to a photo grouping on the mantel showing previous generations of women in her family, dating to servitude on an Alabama plantation.
"Her name was Lettie Mae. I don't know if that's one word or two. I never heard her called anything but Lettie Mae. My grandmother didn't accept 'Can't.' "
Like her mother before her, Lettie Mae was a house servant on the Bankhead Plantation, now part of Sulligent, Ala. There's a Taylor family legend that Gladyse's great-grandmother was the child of a slave woman and the plantation's owner, John Hollis Bankhead. If true, that would make Gladyse a distant relative of Bankhead's granddaughter, Tallulah Bankhead, the film and stage star of the 1930s and '40s.
She's not much impressed by that touch of celebrity, finding enough drama in Lettie Mae's life story. "She jumped out a window of the plantation house," Taylor says, "and caught the train for Chicago."
She wasn't alone in casting her fate with Chicago around 1919. That was the era of the Great Migration, when Southern blacks flocked northward, drawn by jobs and pushed by poverty and Jim Crow segregation. The most common rail route to Chicago was along the Illinois Central Railroad tracks three blocks east of Taylor's house. On the train north, Lettie Mae met a handsome porter who would subsequently look after her as she settled into the city and, later still, would become Taylor's grandfather.
By the time she was 7, Taylor and her mother had moved out of the area, but the little girl was allowed to come back alone on the bus to visit her grandmother and aunt. Sometimes her teen-aged cousin would fail to meet her at the bus stop, and she would slip away for short, delicious detours to marvel at the stone-fronted mansions.
"There were alcoves, nooks and crannies, beveled glass. I noticed the way the roofs were." She remembers having what an adult would dismiss as an impossible dream: "One day," she vowed, "I'm going to have one of these homes for myself."
Decades later, the grown-up version of that childish determination would confront the bankers and investors who had written off the area as irredeemable. "When I was looking for a loan," she said, "banker after banker looked at me like I was crazy."
Taylor recalls that it was love at first sight when she spotted the house that's now her home. "I turned the corner and said, 'That's it.' It was a debilitated, old graystone, but it had a feminine appeal," she says. "There was something soft and gentle about it."
That was in the early 1990s. She was married by then to a confirmed North Sider but felt the tug of her old neighborhood. Reluctantly at first, her husband, Bernard, joined her on tours of the landscape of her youth.
"We spent weekends tramping through abandoned buildings," she says. "Some were mansions. Some had dumbwaiters. Some even had ballrooms, but this place was just right, not too big, not so grand, exactly right."
It was the fairy-tale castle she had envisioned as a child, and they never looked at another building. The house wasn't for sale, but that didn't stop her. She pleaded, harangued and negotiated, and finally, for $35,000, the place was theirs.
The couple put more money and a lot of sweat into renovating. They bought bricks for a patio and buried them underground until construction could start. The neighborhood wasn't all that secure then.
There were treasures in the 115-year-old house-clawfoot bathtubs, ornate radiators-and a puzzle: Three separate gas lines ran up the back of the building.
"We finally figured out that it was one line for each floor," she says. "The house had been cut up into kitchenettes."
The journey of once-gracious homes into vacant lots often passed through a period during which buildings were chopped up into multiple units stuffed with as many families as possible. Increasing poverty and decreasing maintenance often set up a spiral of decline into abandonment. As the neighborhood plummeted, homeowners who waited too long to get out were stuck with property they couldn't sell.
"There were people who had beautiful homes, and they just walked away," Taylor says, shaking her head in disbelief.
Taylor's house, and the properties on either side of it, tell the history of the neighborhood. Her place, one of the area's original gracious homes, has been saved and restored. Next door was its exact twin, built at the same time for a daughter of the original owners. The twin building won't experience renovation; it was torn down years ago. On the other side of her house, a vacant lot has become, in just a few months, another of the many new homes that mark the community's revival.
For as long as anyone can remember, Chicago has been not one but two distinct cities, the North Side, where the Taylors lived as newlyweds, and the South Side, where they live now.
The North Side has been thought of as a place of trendy bars and restaurants, the richer and whiter home to professionals and business people. The blue-collar South Side has had the image of being poorer and blacker, dotted with corner taverns, barbecue shacks and blues joints.
That traditional view could change as the hard-won success of North Kenwood/Oakland influences redevelopment in nearby South Side neighborhoods. Its progress already is being watched by other down-at-the heels communities across the country looking to find their way back.
Residents in the community would be proud to hear of that interest. But most don't dwell on such grand issues as: Can Chicago become at last one city? Can North Kenwood/Oakland be a model for community rebirth across the nation? Instead, up and down Oakwood and Ellis and Greenwood, they say they're happy to have found a place that, though there's room for fine-tuning, feels like home. They're quietly proud to have had a hand in the process.
Robert Blackwell, 45, could afford to live just about anywhere in the city. He is a consultant and entrepreneur who has chosen to move to North Kenwood/Oakland. He bought a 100-year-old house and gutted the interior to make it starkly modern. He also bought vacant lots and built homes on them, naming them with inscriptions over the front doors honoring black heroes-scientist George Washington Carver, and singer and activist Paul Robeson.
"All over the city, you see buildings with names on them," Blackwell says. "Now a few names are black people's."
He set up a scholarship fund at nearby King High. As a successful black businessman, he sought to speak with young men hanging out on the streets about pathways to mainstream success. How did he, as a newly arrived resident, make contact with those normally suspicious youth?
"It wasn't hard. At the time I was driving a Viper," he says, referring to the $85,000 sports car.
Blackwell allows that, as the neighborhood upgrades, it will become more mixed economically and racially. The latter is no big deal to him either way.
"A neighborhood doesn't need racial integration to be successful," he says. "When a suburb wants to upgrade, do they say, 'Send us some black people?' "
Kristin Buck was not yet married and 30 years old when she bought into North Kenwood/Oakland eight years ago. As blond as blond can be, she definitely stood out in an African-American neighborhood and initially was a target for some verbal abuse from youngsters.
That didn't deter her. She had come upon an absolutely charming 1886 row house-charming if you looked past the fact that it had been abandoned, had a chunk of roof missing and sported gang graffiti on the interior walls. She figured she could fix all that.
"I know just enough about remodeling to be dangerous," she says.
Buck, now 38, had grown up in Clarendon Hills, lived in inner-city neighborhoods in college, wasn't particularly concerned about being a minority in a minority neighborhood. Besides, the places she had looked at on the North Side were too expensive. She knew the public housing was coming down. She saw potential there, not just financial, but for a feeling of community.
In the first few years, she'd sometimes hear gunfire. People would warn her that no one would come to visit. "That was OK," she says. "I was happy just to be working on the house."
Despite the night the old clawfoot tub she found at a salvage shop tipped over with her in it, she persevered and, over time, the house got fixed-fixed well enough to win a Landmarks Commission award for exterior preservation.
She and her husband, Keith (who, when he first came courting, worried, "I'll run out of gas and be killed"), have made friends in the neighborhood. Also, despite the warnings, they have found that suburban friends do come for dinner and an eye-opening tour of the neighborhood.
She and Keith, 36, both have made substantial commutes to work in the northwest suburbs. Still, they prefer city living.
"Do I like everybody up and down the block?" Kristin said. "No, but each morning when I go to the car with a cup of coffee in my hand, there's the woman across street coming out onto her porch with her coffee. We say 'Hi.' It's a neighborhood."
- - -
The Mistake By The Lake
Despite the prevailing racism of 1930s America, the need for decent housing for Chicago's burgeoning black community could not be ignored. Reformers and city fathers got together on a plan to take down ramshackle buildings throughout the city's ghettos and replace them with public housing projects. A subsidized apartment would rent for far less than a tenement, plus it would have working plumbing and heating.
One of the city's first such projects was the Ida B. Wells homes, dedicated in 1940. The low-rise structures were set on a 47-acre site on the Oakland neighborhood's northern border. A park with playgrounds and athletic fields was incorporated into the site.
When Wells opened with 1,662 units, a tidal wave of 17,544 applications poured in.
Being accepted as a CHA resident then was a social merit badge. Renters had to be intact families with a breadwinner. Children had to be in school. Early CHA residents remember an era of well-run buildings and a sense of community when residents of the projects, like their neighbors outside those buildings, were active in school and other neighborhood activities.
All that would change.
As the black population continued to grow through the 1950s, it began to spill beyond Chicago's original South Side ghetto. City officials and influential downtown merchants feared the Loop would be adjoined by slums that would scare away shoppers. In desperation, authorities turned to public housing as a way to keep blacks confined to black neighborhoods. City Hall and the CHA quietly worked out a secret deal whereby new projects would be built exclusively in African-American areas and white aldermen were given veto power to keep public housing out of their wards.
Three decades later, the results of that veto were clear. When a federal lawsuit was filed against the CHA for perpetuating segregation, the agency admitted in testimony that the aldermanic veto "had resulted in the rejection of 99.5 percent of the units proposed in white areas which had initially been selected for public housing."
Thus was the city split into a largely white North Side and an increasingly black South Side.
The city's insistence on maintaining segregation determined not only the racial geography of Chicago but also the architecture of its public housing. During and after the '50s, CHA housing took on a more ominous, towering look than earlier, low-rise developments.
U.S. court documents noted, "As the city wanted to build in only slum-clearance areas and had to find housing for both those people who were displaced by slum clearance and for those large numbers of others looking for housing, it had to go up to heights of 15 or 20 stories."
Some realized that stacking so many poor families one atop another was bound to have a bad outcome. One was Robert Taylor, the first African-American chairman of the CHA. Not only were his objections ignored, but when he died in 1957, what would become one of the most notorious of the projects, housing 27,000 residents, was named in his memory.
With the priority being to evacuate slum areas for clearance while packing black families into contained parts of the city, the CHA abandoned the standards to which earlier renters had been held. Projects became huge reservoirs of impoverished, broken families. That despair seeped out into the surrounding neighborhood.
Eventually, the failure of public-housing policy became undeniable. When a suit was filed on behalf of tenants, a federal judge ruled that CHA policies reinforced segregation. In a follow-up to that case, the court determined that the CHA was unfit to run public housing, which ultimately led to a reversal of policy and the taking down of the massive housing projects.
Even before those rulings, resident Gladyse Taylor's grandmother, Lettie Mae, saw the coming ill effects of public-housing policy on families and neighborhoods.
"My grandmother said, 'No.' She sent my mother and me to the south suburbs," Taylor says. "She didn't want her family to sink into generations of welfare."
-- C.L. and R.G.
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Tribune writers Ron Grossman and Charles Leroux have collaborated on many articles on the city's changing demographics.
Next Sunday, we'll look at how city living has become chic again, and how a variety of factors came together in North Kenwood/Oakland in a "perfect storm" of redevelopment--a model being studied by other neighborhoods across the country.
