Certainly, this groundswell of opposition owed something to the “Obama effect”—to the potent feelings of political possibility the election of this black president spread through the American left and through socially and economically marginalized urban communities across the country. On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama delivered his historic victory speech at Chicago’s Grant Park, and one has to conclude that the hundreds of thousands of working-class black Chicagoans gathered there to witness the event believed him in their hearts when he told them “change has come to America.” But for many blacks in Chicago the hope instilled by this victory was not nearly audacious enough to overcome a cancerous pessimism that had been spreading for decades. Not even three months after the celebration in Grant Park, political scientist Cathy Cohen, who was completing her fine study on the political lives of young African Americans in the United States, set up a focus group of black Chicagoans between the ages of 18 and 24. What she found was that even among people within this age group, who still had most of their lives ahead of them, the euphoria surrounding Obama’s election was tempered with a strong dose of skepticism. “The young people in the room,” Cohen observed, “were . . . quick to recenter the discussion about change away from the national level to city politics, where they hold little hope for any change . . . As far as the city of Chicago is concerned,” one of her respondents told her, “most of the money and emphasis is being put on the more affluent . . . North Side neighborhoods, like the Wrigleyvilles and the Andersonvilles and Lincoln Park neighborhoods that have already been flourishing for years.”76
CITY OF NEIGHBORHOODS ON THE MAKE
Of all the nicknames for Chicago, the one that seemed to be the most visible during Richard M. Daley’s years in office was “City of Neighborhoods.” This was somewhat odd in that it was the nickname whose origins were the most difficult to pin down. Sandburg gave us “City of Big Shoulders,” Algren “City on the Make,” proud New Yorkers “Second City,” the national press corps “City that Works,” and while the source of “Windy City” is still a matter of debate, one can find references to it in the Chicago press way back in the late 1850s. When City of Neighborhoods was referenced, on the other hand, it was always in the passive voice—as in “Chicago has often been called the City of Neighborhoods.” Few, if any, scholars have attempted to establish the history of this appellation, and that is because it is a name that evolved gradually out of a number of sources. In terms of deep historical origins, it is hard to dissociate the whole City of Neighborhoods mythology from the project spearheaded by University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess to divide the city into seventy-seven “community areas” in the 1920s. Then, during the reign of Richard J. Daley neighborhood gradually began to displace community in common parlance. Even as he was advancing policies that were pouring resources into the central business district and hanging many of the peripheral neighborhoods out to dry, the Boss’s campaign rhetoric was filled with declarations of loyalty to the city’s “neighborhoods.” But it was during the Harold Washington years that the notion started to gain currency and legitimacy, when, for example, historians Dominic Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett chose to entitle their book Chicago: City of Neighborhoods.77
Chicago’s identity as a city of neighborhoods was thus fairly well established when Richard M. Daley took the mayor’s office, but it was during his reign that Chicago became the City of Neighborhoods. This was not only because Daley followed the lead of his father in lovingly employing the concept of “neighborhood” to charm working-class Chicagoans while he was betraying their interests, but also because he made Chicago’s recognition as the City of Neighborhoods a matter of public policy. Whether it was installing eighteen-meter-high steel Puerto Rican flags at each end of Humboldt Park’s “Paseo Boricua” along Division Street, or cruising in a pink Cadillac on North Halsted Street—through the heart of the city’s gay “Boystown” neighborhood—in the 1989 Gay Pride parade, or collaborating with black leaders in Bronzeville to better exploit the area’s cultural heritage, or annually sponsoring some four hundred “neighborhood festivals . . . showcasing the city’s ethnic customs, music and food,” Mayor Daley worked hard to maintain Chicago’s reputation as the City of Neighborhoods.78 Nor was this neighborhood motif merely window dressing for the larger neoliberal project. Rather, it was a core element of the global-city agenda, which hinged, in part, on the vitality of the new economy of tourism and on the city’s ability to brand itself as a unique place to visit and live.
A prime example of how the City of Neighborhoods campaign fit into this project was the Chicago Neighborhood Tours program, which the Office of Tourism and Culture began operating in 1997 out of the Chicago Cultural Center downtown. Thirteen years later the City of Chicago was running tours of over thirty neighborhoods, each of which offered, according to the program’s brochure, “a unique adventure in our exciting and diverse communities.”79 The Daley administration played an active part in marking and defining many of the city’s different neighborhoods, dipping into ample funds made available through his $800 million “Neighborhoods Alive!” bond spending program in 1997 to put replicas of Greek temples in Greektown, twenty-three-foot-tall rainbow-striped metal pylons in the gay Lakeview neighborhood of Boystown, and, perhaps most importantly, ethnically flavored community centers throughout the city. Daley’s drive to identify space was so determined that he went forward with his Boystown streetscape project despite a barrage of thousands of angry letters to the city council and a critical column in the Tribune that decried the equation of gayness with ethnicity. In the end, the mayor yielded to the pressure by toning down the original plan, but Boystown nonetheless got its $3.2 million renovation and its unmistakably gay-friendly pylons, which, according to the city, paid “tribute to the gay and lesbian community of Chicago and to the rainbow of diversity that has historically been the great strength of the Lakeview community.”80 Chicago thus became one of the first cities in the country to officially distinguish a gay neighborhood with such physical landmarks.
The strong role played by City Hall in advancing this kind of project seems to suggest once again the utility of Henri Lefebvre’s work on the “production of space.”81 Developed out of a neo-Marxist framework, Lefebvre’s notion of continual struggle over space between the state and capital, on the one hand, and subordinate social groups, on the other, nonetheless needs some correctives to be effectively applied to Chicago’s recent history. In the case of Boystown in the 1990s, where, as Timothy Stewart-Winter has argued, “queer clout was intertwined with pro-growth development policies,” the story was ultimately one of incorporation rather than resistance to state power.82 Moreover, as we have previously seen, efforts to identify neighborhood spaces as distinct ethnoracial communities have at times taken the form of turf battles between two different subordinate groups, and Lefebvre’s Marxist framework is not well equipped for understanding such dynamics in multiethnic cities like Chicago, where blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and working-class whites on the West Side were engaged in bitter battles over schools, parks, and neighborhood spaces—conflicts that ended up sorting these groups into a number of ethnoracially defined enclaves that still exist. This was the moment that witnessed Mexicans moving eagerly into Pilsen and Puerto Ricans into the Humboldt Park area—which is not to say that the “production” of these ethnoracially marked neighborhood spaces did not in some ways signify opposition to the state in the form of the Daley machine. After the 1966 barrio riot in Humboldt Park, Puerto Ricans marched along Division Street to demonstrate their right to live in their neighborhood without fear of police harassment, and in 1973 Mexicans in Pilsen, parents and students alike, organized a militant grassroots movement to pressure the board of education to provide them with their own community high school, which, quite symbolically, would take the name of reformist Mexican president Benito Juárez. And yet, although residents in these neighborhoods were certainly demanding their “right to the city,” as Lefebvre referred to it
, their demands were much more like appeals to a referee than challenges to the rules of the game. They were, in effect, objecting to the state treating them differently from some groups, or, even worse, treating them too much like others. Puerto Ricans taking to the streets against police brutality in Humboldt Park knew all too well that the police subjected mostly blacks to such abuse, and animating the Mexican uprising in Pilsen for a school of their own—for “La Raza,” as activists at the time shouted—were years of simmering tensions between black and Mexican students at nearby Harrison High School.
FIGURE 18. Richard M. Daley marching in the annual South Chicago Mexican Independence Day parade. Kim Karpeles / Alamy Stock Photo.
Hence, even when Chicagoans seemed to have been directly engaged in struggles against city authorities, their actions were about much more than resistance to the city’s drive to define and control spaces for the benefit of capital. The “right to the city” in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s correlated closely with the politics of ethnocultural recognition, and this situation changed the story considerably from what Lefebvre was observing in Paris. Nor was City Hall particularly interested in opposing the kinds of ethnoracial boundaries being established. The machine had always made the most of Chicago’s balkanized social geography, playing groups off each other and incorporating local elites to advance its objectives; after it became clear that the identity-based movements of the 1960s were not going to pose much of a threat to the order of things, it went about its business as usual. African Americans, for example, painted black fists and revolutionary slogans on ghetto walls, managed to place black nationalists in local positions of authority, and won the right to have black teachers teach their children about black history, but this did relatively little to change the overall calculus of power or to reshape city spaces in any significant way.
Despite these differences, Lefebvre’s attention to how space is socially constructed is important for understanding some of the essential forces behind the making of Chicago’s neighborhoods, especially during the Richard M. Daley era, when the city took on a new role of actually promoting the efforts of community leaders to define the identities of their neighborhoods. In a rapidly globalizing world, in which homogenous architectural styles and the proliferation of chain retailers (such as the Gap, Banana Republic, and Whole Foods), restaurants (such as McDonalds and Buca di Beppo), and coffee shops (such as Starbucks) were increasingly making a distinct sense of place a precious commodity, Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods served as a strong selling point in attracting tourists and new residents. Support for the ethnoracial and lifestyle orientations (gay, bohemian, family, and so on) of different neighborhoods, moreover, distracted residents from bread-and-butter issues. The politics of neighborhood diversity became important in Chicago, it is important to emphasize, during the same moment when, according to Neil Smith, municipal administrations throughout the United States and much of the developed world were taking the scope and scale of gentrification to another level. Smith argues that around the mid-1980s a “third wave” of gentrification began to sweep through cities worldwide, when, in the context of deindustrialization, municipalities increasingly looked to the regeneration of urban space as a means of generating new tax-revenue streams.83 Characterizing this shift were, among other things, a far more active role for the local state, the increasing autonomy of private capital in the development game, an underlying ethos of taking back the city for the middle class, and, in response to all this, the proliferation of local antigentrification movements.84
This last manifestation—the appearance of neighborhood movements defending the rights of low-income residents to affordable housing—seemed to signal the kind of class-based struggle over space Lefebvre described. But once again the politics of ethnoracial identity complicated the situation. In fact, despite appearing to be sensitive to the ethnoracial integrity of Chicago’s neighborhoods, City Hall’s myriad policies to promote gentrification tended, in practice, to undermine the goal of maintaining a diverse social geography. In a city in which nonwhites constituted a rather small segment of the middling class of homeowners, rising rental prices and property values invariably translated into increasing ethnoracial homogeneity. And these circumstances led at times to racially infused complaints likening gentrification to an invasion of white yuppies (or “young urban professionals”)—a notion that ultimately worked to obscure the powerful logic of class division that was emerging at the urban grassroots in the high era of gentrification.
As Mary Pattillo has convincingly revealed in her study of the South Side neighborhood of North Kenwood–Oakland, even in predominantly black neighborhoods where bonds of ethnoracial solidarity were undeniably strong and where gentrification was largely being driven by black rather than white middle-class home buyers, community revitalization occured at the expense of low-income residents. Although the promoters of gentrification offered arguments that the poor would benefit from better schools and a more congenial atmosphere, Pattillo shows that this was often not the case. Poor, uneducated black parents were frequently unable to steer their kids through newly created selective schools, and, while crime rates did indeed descend as the middle-class population rose, low-income residents commonly encountered other forms of hostility directed at them from new homeowners anxious about threats to their property values. In North Kenwood–Oakland, for example, Pattillo observed middle-class residents seeking police intervention to put an end to the local custom of weekend barbecues in highly visible park spaces. The sight of working-class folks gathered around smoking barbecues was, for many of the new white-collar residents, an unbefitting image for an aspiring black middle-class neighborhood.85
While the “right to barbecue” may appear somewhat trivial in the overall scheme of things, it touches upon a critical development in the real story of neighborhood in Chicago. This conflict, in fact, represents merely one manifestation of the struggle increasingly pitting middle-class homeowners and local merchants against low-income renters to define neighborhood space in many of the city’s ethnoracial communities. To be sure, fault lines of this nature had existed in Chicago’s ethnoracial neighborhoods in the past. There was seldom one prevailing vision of what the neighborhood was or should be. For instance, even at the peak moment of ethnocultural awakening in both African American and Puerto Rican Chicago in the late 1960s, more moderate, assimilationist voices could be heard warning against the excesses of cultural nationalism. But during the “third wave” of gentrification some two decades later, when a powerful partnership between City Hall, private developers, and real estate promoters quickened the pace and scale of spatial transformation, the politics of neighborhood became increasingly polarized around opposing class interests within such communities. This was primarily because a real estate boom throughout much of the city translated into a bonanza for property owners and merchants ready to capitalize on the new class of clients. For example, in the West Town community area, a twelve-square-kilometer parallelogram northwest of the Loop encompassing some of Chicago’s hottest real estate markets—Wicker Park, Bucktown, and the Ukrainian Village—average property prices rose by 83 percent and the median price for an apartment more than doubled in the 1990s.86 The problem, however, was that low-income and elderly residents on fixed incomes realized few benefits from these gains. Rents rose in step with property prices, and more and more renters faced being pushed out of the neighborhood as property owners looked to convert rental units into high-yielding condominiums.
In many gentrifying neighborhoods, moreover, most of those being displaced tended to be Latinos and blacks while the vast majority of those replacing them overwhelmingly white. The case of West Town, where Latinos constituted nearly 60 percent of the population in 1990, was especially suggestive. By 1998, according to one study, white households in this area were the recipients of nearly 80 percent of the home loans granted, and Latino households received less than 10 percent.87 This apparent “yuppie invasion” not only raised co
ncerns among working-class residents about rising rents but also provoked a broader community reaction to the potential loss of the neighborhood’s cultural identity. The response mingled feelings of ethnic pride with material concerns.
Although some businessmen had feared the negative consequences of fierce ethnoracial pride in the 1960s and 1970s, many local merchants in the West Town area, by the 1990s, had developed viable businesses providing goods and services to both an ethnic clientele as well as tourists seeking to sample local culture. Few neighborhoods exhibited this trend more than Pilsen, where Alderman Danny Solis led an aggressive campaign to market the area as a Mexican-themed tourist destination.88 “My vision for Pilsen,” Solis told the Sun-Times in 2003, “is to become the best Mexican-American community in the Midwest, where you can come, taste the food and experience the culture.”89 Ethnic commercial enterprises also played a role in maintaining the Puerto Rican community’s claim to West Town’s Humboldt Park district, where Puerto Rican businesses still dominated Division Street despite the fact that both African Americans and Mexicans had come to outnumber Puerto Ricans.90 Yet even more important in preserving the Puerto Rican identity of the area were the numerous political and cultural associations clustered around the Paseo Boricua, including the vibrant Puerto Rican Cultural Center at 2739 West Division, whose work involved, according to its executive director, José E. Lopez, “recovering [the] community’s historical memory as part of a holistic vision of development.”91 Elites in both Pilsen and Humboldt Park thus looked to exploit their neighborhood’s cultural heritage, with somewhat differing results.
Chicago on the Make Page 40
