Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  And yet, if, as Arendt claimed, violence could destroy power, it was not the only force that was working against the project of bringing “power to the people.” The politics of identity was a double-edged sword for the left in Chicago during this epic moment. The streets of Chicago had always been the place where young people constructed, performed, and negotiated the meanings of their ethnoracial identities—in rituals of play, war, and love. By the early 1960s, during the high times of the civil rights era, these rituals took on an increasingly perceptible political feeling; with the circulation of images and ideas associated with the struggles of young blacks in the South against forms of discrimination at school and in venues of commercial leisure, kids out on the streets defending their communities and their identities began to see themselves as political actors, and local activists were quick to capitalize on this to get people out on the streets for more formal political causes. British sociologist Paul Gilroy has observed that “collective identities spoken through race, community and locality are, for all their spontaneity, powerful means to co-ordinate actions and create solidarity,” a situation that by the end of the 1960s had made a fetish out of the city’s most visible ethnoracial identities.17

  The spiritual, magical, salvational qualities that people attributed to these identities pushed them out into the streets of their neighborhoods to engage in quasi-religious rituals of collective identification. Some of the violence between gangs around this time loosely fit this description, as did uprisings against the police, which could very quickly turn into potent demonstrations of community pride. Such was the case in the often overlooked Division Street riot of 1966, when the Puerto Rican barrio in Humboldt Park seemed to discover its sense of self as it took to the streets to protest the shooting of a local youth by a policeman breaking up a gang scuffle. This was also the context that gave rise to the Chicago mural movement of the early 1970s, which saw aspiring artists in black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican neighborhoods spreading broad swaths of bright paint over drab walls to create vivid scenes of everyday community life that harkened back to the New Deal–era murals influenced by artists like Diego Rivera. The “community mural movement,” as it has come to be known, began in black Chicago before spreading, most notably, to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. More precisely, it began with the once-famous Wall of Respect at 43rd and Langley—a kind of Mount Rushmore for the black community—which included the faces of fifty black writers, musicians, and political leaders considered to be “black heroes” by the fifteen artists who collaborated on the project in 1967. The Wall became a meeting point for black power groups around Bronzeville and the Kenwood area, a place where the maxims of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown (Martin Luther King’s head was conspicuously absent from the Wall) filled the air, and in 1969 and 1970 it became a rallying point for its own sake, as the city devised an urban renewal plan that would have meant the Wall’s demolition. However, a fire “of unknown origins” rather than urban renewal ultimately destroyed the Wall in 1971, but by then one of its principal creators, William Walker, had already met up with some Mexican and Puerto Rican artists to form the Chicago Mural Group—a multiracial artists’ cooperative that sought to fill the urban landscape with billboards displaying racial and social injustices. One of the finest examples of the work of this collective can be seen today in the Humboldt Park barrio at the corner of LeMoyne and Rockwell, where the mural Breaking the Chains covers the wall of a well-maintained three-story walk-up. Painted by John Pitman Weber, the cofounder of the Chicago Mural Group, along with a number of Puerto Rican residents, the mural depicts black, brown, and white hands breaking chains and reaching up towards the sun.18

  FIGURE 13. The Wall of Respect, a site of frequent gatherings in the late 1960s. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images.

  Such celebrations of “race, community, and locality” created a level of political engagement by average people in the context of everyday Chicago life that has seldom been approached since. The problem was that the same primordial feelings and attachments that were bringing people into the streets were also reinforcing a logic of ethnoracial difference—a logic already embedded within the city’s ethnoracially balkanized social geography—that made the development of powerful multiracial coalitions a nearly impossible task. We will never know how far Chairman Fred might have taken his “rainbow coalition,” but we do know that, at the time of his death, such notions had, for the most part, captured the hearts and souls of only an avant garde fringe of activists, intellectuals, and artists.

  More indicative of how the politics of identity were shaping grassroots progressive politics was the student-led movement to reform Chicago’s high schools in the spring and fall of 1968—one of the last of its kind. Emerging out of a general spirit of discontent about the sorry state of Chicago schools, this movement took the form of two parallel mobilizations—one black and one Latino—from its very first days. Ironically, black and Latino students had similar complaints regarding the Chicago Board of Education’s refusal to recognize their cultural identity and deal with the discrimination they faced at the hands of white teachers, but their demands never found common ground. White students, for their part, largely stood on the sidelines when they were not actively, even violently, opposing their fellow black and Latino students. Harrison High School, located on the 2800 block of West 24th Street, along the border between the Near West Side and Pilsen, found itself in the center of things. The leaders of the militant black student organization the New Breed went to school at Harrison, and the most vocal Latino student organization, a group that included famed Mexican activist Rudy Lozano, also formed here. Harrison was one of the only schools in the city at that time that mixed significant numbers of blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and whites, so it could have served as a stunning example of multiracial cooperation against the machine. But this was not to be. The black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and white youths at Harrison had come of age in a street culture that placed a premium on defending the boundaries of their ethnoracial communities against outsiders, and these were hard habits to break. If, as Paul Ricoeur has argued, the self achieves identity and meaning through the detour to the other, this process, in the context of Chicago politics, had profound consequences.19 In the end, the board of education had little reason not to accede to the demands of black and Latino students. And so Superintendent James Redmond pledged to extend the half-year Afro-American history course being offered in thirty-six high schools to a whole year, to purchase new textbooks that “placed greater emphasis upon contributions of minority groups,” to pursue “efforts to achieve a racial integration of staff throughout the system,” and to strengthen relations with parent-teacher associations (PTAs) and student groups.20 The board of education had effectively institutionalized the politics of identity, a situation that did little to change the fact that public school system was heading straight towards the precipice.

  SKYSCRAPERS, MARTINIS, AND FUTURES

  Perhaps more than any other city in the United States, Chicago today captures with stark clarity the contrast between wealth and poverty that American-style free-market capitalism produced over the long twentieth century. What makes the contrast so vivid is the spatial proximity of the two extremes. In Chicago, one can board an “L” train amidst the bustling avenues of the Loop business district, where an army of chauffeurs, valets, and doormen expedite business executives through revolving doors and into the stately lobbies of firms whose influence stretches to the far corners of the world, and minutes later be looking down from the elevated tracks at the hyperghetto, where boarded-up buildings and litter-strewn vacant lots mark a land that time forgot. In some areas of the hyperghetto, the main signs of commercial activity are hand-to-hand drug sales, liquor stores, and currency exchanges, where those without proper bank accounts can cash checks and pay utility bills for hefty fees. The only institutions competing with liquor stores for customers in need of medicine for the soul are storefr
ont churches.

  Chicago’s hyperghettos are not so different from ghetto neighborhoods in several of the other midwestern and northeastern cities that constitute the American Rust Belt, and they share a similar story of deindustrialization, urban decline, and white flight that reshaped much of the northern metropolitan United States in the postwar decades. Between 1947 and 1982, factory employment in Chicago dropped from 688,000 to 277,000 (59 percent), a period that also witnessed a steep decline in Chicago’s middle- and upper-income families—some 30 percent between 1960 and 1980 alone. Between 1947 and 1982, moreover, Chicago’s share of the metropolitan-area job market dropped from 70.6 percent to 34.2 percent, a decrease that was due not only to the loss of manufacturing work in the city but also to the increase in suburban jobs.21 Some of these losses of jobs and people were associated with the suburbanization that the federal government had set in motion with a range of subsidies that placed homeownership within the reach of middle-class citizens who before the 1940s could have only dreamed of owning a home. The 1960s and 1970s saw the rapid growth of Chicago’s posh North Shore railroad suburbs, as well as the suburbs of DuPage County to the west.

  Already by the end of the 1960s, these processes had caused Chicago to lose its place as “second city” to Los Angeles, whose population of 10 million easily surpassed the 7.8 million inhabitants in its greater metropolitan area. But things took a sharp turn for the worse in the 1970s, when, within a national economy disrupted by oil shocks and stagflation, Chicago lost 15 percent of its retail stores, 25 percent of its factories, and 14 percent of its jobs, and Chicago families experienced a 10 percent fall in real income.22 Moreover, while per capita personal income did still rise during this decade, the pace lagged behind Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and St. Louis, and by 1981 it was just 4 percent above the national average (whereas in 1965 it had been 30 percent higher than the national average).23 The devastation wrought during these years was made visible by the 1980 census, which indicated that ten of the country’s sixteen poorest neighborhoods were in black Chicago. If times were hard in the 1970s, black Chicagoans bore the brunt. Between 1963 and 1977, when the city as a whole lost 29 percent of its jobs, black Chicago’s drop was 46 percent.24

  Yet it is misleading to think of this decade and the turbulent years leading up to it as a period of doom and decline. By the early 1970s, one could behold in the Chicago sky a number of majestic steel and glass structures stretching towards the clouds—symbols of a city on the rise. Between 1968 and 1975, work was completed on five of the ten tallest buildings that would define the contours of Chicago’s skyline at the end of the twentieth century: the John Hancock Center (1968), the Chase Tower (1969), the Standard Oil Building (1972), the Sears Tower (1973), and Water Tower Place (1975), along with what was at the time the tallest residential building in the world, Lake Point Tower (1968).25 Just when the action on the streets was at its hottest, the city, with the help of the internationally renowned architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was doing all it could to move its precious white-collar professionals into secure, air-conditioned cubicles in the sky. If the 1920s witnessed the first great vertical move of American cities, a second wave of skyscraper construction occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s, when work was completed on a number of the buildings that would become the well-recognized landmarks of the country’s great urban centers—the World Trade Towers in New York City, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, the John Hancock Building in Boston, and the Sears Tower in Chicago.26

  FIGURE 14. The Chicago skyline looking north from the South Loop lakefront, 1974. C. William Brubaker. C. William Brubaker Collection, bru005_11_oF, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.

  At first glance, the timing of this skyscraper boom may seem rather enigmatic. Normally, such capital-intensive projects thrive in relatively risk-free market circumstances, and, while credit had been lined up and ground had been broken on some of these buildings a few years prior to the global economic doldrums that followed the Arab-Israeli War and OPEC oil embargo of 1973, the U.S. economy had already been showing signs of instability by 1966, when corporate productivity and profitability began to decline, provoking a credit crunch in 1966 and 1967. With increasing competition from Japan, Western Europe, and a number of newly industrializing countries, the U.S.-dominated international economic order that had been established by the 1945 Bretton Woods agreement broke apart at the end of 1971, and with it, its system of fixed exchange rates that tied currencies all over the world to the gold-backed U.S. dollar. These were thus precarious times to be investing in large-scale infrastructural projects whose success depended on strong economic growth. New York City was facing bankruptcy and Chicago’s financial condition was hardly rock solid. In 1971 the stockyards closed down for good and the steel mills were on the verge of a significant decline. Moreover, Illinois was struck with a sharp drop in defense contracts in the 1960s and 1970s, another factor that weighed heavily upon the local economy. By the end of the 1970s, the credit-rating agency Moody’s downgraded Chicago’s bond rating, and the school system was facing a major budget shortfall. And yet, despite all this, the buildings kept moving skyward.

  As the old industrial order was crumbling, a new economic order was already rapidly taking shape, and Chicago was vying for a central place within it. Scholars like David Harvey and Saskia Sassen have described this moment as one of deep structural transformation for the world economy, as the postwar framework of Fordism and state managerial Keynesianism collapsed and out of its remains emerged a new system characterized by more flexible labor arrangements and new sectors of production based on the provision of specialized financial services for an increasingly globalized economy.27 For Sassen, in particular, such momentous changes would have major consequences for a group of new “global cities” that would take on strategically critical roles “as highly concentrated command points in the organization of the world economy” and “key locations for finance and for specialized service firms.”28 FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) activities would come to dominate the new “producer services” orientation of these global cities, along with marketing, advertising, employment, and legal services. The rise of these new service industries, in turn, would have a powerful impact on urban form, especially on the spatial layout of downtown business districts. Although many observers of the urban scene at the time believed that recent advances in telecommunications technologies would make high-density business districts obsolete, a very different scenario came to pass; the internationalization of corporate operations instead transformed the cores of global cities into dense concentrations of service providers capable of exercising centralizing functions over sprawling commercial activities.

  The consequences for Chicago—once the “city of the big shoulders” and “hog butcher to the world”—were nothing short of spectacular. By 1980, Chicago’s central business district, which covered just 3.5 percent of the city’s total surface area, accounted for roughly 40 percent of the city’s property taxes. Moreover, while the city as a whole lost nearly one-quarter of a million jobs during the 1970s, white-collar employment in the Loop rose at a respectable pace. In effect, Chicago was turning the corner towards its future as the nation’s third-ranking global city, with a (4.2 percent) share of the total national employment in producer services that placed it close behind Los Angeles (with 4.6 percent) and far ahead of fourth-place Houston (with 1.7 percent).29 In the insurance sector, it was second only to New York—a position symbolized by the black fortress-like tower that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed for its developer and tenant, the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company. At one hundred stories and 344 meters, it was at the time of its completion the tallest building in the world outside Manhattan, and, although credit problems halted its construction in 1967, it was ready to serve as a backdrop to the combat that reigned in the streets during the summer of 1968. This was, in part, its function, even if few involved in its construction w
ould have thought of it in this way at the time.

  Guy Debord seized upon the notion of “spectacle” in 1967 because it was elemental to the epic struggle that was transpiring in this pivotal moment in the history of capitalism. “The period from 1965 to 1973 was one in which the inability of Fordism and Keynesianism to contain the inherent contradictions of capitalism became more and more apparent,” David Harvey has argued.30 In the United States a range of protest movements had made the streets and neighborhoods of American cities into spectacles of this crisis, notably during Chicago’s Democratic National Convention of 1968. As ineffectual as the Yippies may have seemed to many, they helped hijack the Daley administration’s attempt to create a spectacle of prestige and power and to transform it into one of ignominy, violence, and disorder. This posed a potential threat to the city’s livelihood in a moment when its political leadership was trying to project an image of order and progress to all the investment capital beginning to fly around the globe.