Never a City So Real

by Alex Kotlowitz

  Reed keeps a record of all his murals, but he never signs his work, out of fear that the housing authority might come after him for defacing their property, though truthfully they should have been compensating him for beautification—and, on occasion, for keeping people out of trouble. Once, a woman who lived on the tenth floor asked Reed to paint the city’s downtown skyline on her living room wall so that it would be as if you were looking right through the cinderblock at the John Hancock Building and Sears Tower lit up at night. Reed charged her one hundred fifty dollars. “It’s just like you were looking right outside,” he said. He came back the following week to put some finishing touches on the mural, and the woman asked him for one other thing, to draw a rendering of her, off to the side, with one arm pushing forward, as if she were reaching for the clouds. “It looked as if she was dancing,” he said. Then she made one final request, that he draw her boyfriend, away from her, upside down. “Make sure you put his face in there, so I know it’s him,” she told Reed. So, he drew him upside down just as she’d asked, his feet straight up in the air. When he stepped back, he realized that he’d drawn this woman pushing her boyfriend out the window. “Instead of murdering that guy,” Reed said laughing, “she can take her fantasy out like that.”

  Not all of it makes sense to him. “I hate to tell you,” he said. “Some people got some weird imaginations.” One woman asked him to paint on one wall a rendering of Jesus (Caucasian, of course), and on another wall a man, standing, his pants unzipped, urinating on a tree. “I can’t know what goes on in these people’s heads,” he said. “I would think that that’s wrong, just to have a person on the wall, taking a leak. And then she said, ‘I don’t like that penis, make it bigger.’ So I says, ‘Wanda, they don’t come that size.’ She says, ‘Maybe yours don’t.’ So I did it. Just like she asked.”

  Some of Reed’s work reflects the fact that death is very much a part of this neighborhood. Drug dealers, with their deep pockets, are his modern-day Medicis. One asked Reed to paint scenes of a young man injuring a policeman, an officer getting shot as he exited his squad car, and an officer getting run over. He obliges such requests because the money can be quite good, and they treat him to free beers, but he despises the work. He can only hope that maybe his renderings will be cathartic and thus help forestall future confrontations between the drug dealers and the police. (Once, he heard that the police were looking for the artist who had done these murals, and he made sure to disappear for a while.) More often, though, his customers request tombstones that read REST IN PEACE and include the name of the deceased friend or relative. In one apartment, a gentleman asked him to draw ten of them in his bedroom. “You know what?” Reed says. “I think it really helped a lot of people, kind of calmed them down.”

  Reed’s now standing on his milk crate as well. He seems to have forgotten his reason for being here, and offers a running commentary on the parade. The city’s mayor, Richard M. Daley, passes by in a convertible, looking unusually relaxed. No mayor has ever missed this parade. In fact, it’s drawn such political luminaries as Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, as well as figures like Muhammad Ali and Nat “King” Cole. Reed’s shaking his head. “I want to ask the mayor, ‘Why’d you do that to Meigs Field the way you did?’ Now you know that wasn’t right.” The demolition of the single runway at Meigs Field, an airport for private planes, was an old-school move by a new-school politician. Earlier in the summer, under cover of night, the mayor had sent a battalion of backhoes and bulldozers to scar the runway with gigantic X-shaped trenches, rendering useless this small lakefront airport—which he wants to rebuild as a park. King Richard the Second, Chicagoans joked—a reference, of course, to King Richard the First, his father. (Between the two of them, they’ve governed Chicago for thirty-five of the last fifty years.) The thing about it, I argue with Reed, is that the mayor was probably right: This prime piece of lakefront property belongs to the people, not to the few who can afford their own airplanes. “Yeah, but it ain’t the right way to go ’bout things,” he argues.

  Of a smiling alderman who is followed by fifty supporters wearing T-shirts bearing his name, Reed remarks, “They should be throwing milk cartons at him.” When the fifty-four-year-old county treasurer, Maria Pappas, jumps out of a convertible to spiritedly twirl a baton, Reed laughs good-heartedly, and applauds out of admiration. A number of white politicians drive by, each accompanied by a black friend or coworker; it seems like a statement—“I have friends who are black”—from another era. But it’s the high-stepping, boogying marching bands that get the crowd worked up, especially the South Shore Drill Team, which stops every couple of blocks to perform their highly choreographed and high-spirited routine.

  The Jesse White Tumblers march by; they’re a group of kids from Cabrini Green, another public-housing complex, who can be seen at events throughout the city, including at halftime during Chicago Bulls games. “Oh, shit,” exclaims Reed. “There’s gonna be some jumping now.” A woman eager to see the tumblers gives me a flirtatious look and climbs onto my milk crate alongside me, her buxom body pressed against mine. A young man hawking bottles of water and sporting a tattoo on his forearm of his deceased pit bull (which, he later tells me, was named “Cats”) winks at my good fortune.

  Reed climbs down and tells me he’s got to get to work. But there are no takers, so he instructs me to sit down and begins to sketch me. Passersby stop to peek over his shoulder; he points to my eyes and eyeglasses and observes, “All this should be smaller, but it’s a nice drawing of a white guy.” A teenage girl takes a look and reprimands Reed. “His glasses ain’t square,” she tells him. He erases the glasses and makes them circular.

  A mother comes by with her five-year-old daughter, sits her on my milk crate, and asks—really, tells—Reed to draw her. The child sits surprisingly still, a bag of blue cotton candy in her lap, and then it starts to rain, so the mother and I hold a sheet of plastic over Reed’s head as the girl pushes the cotton candy under her leg to keep it dry. “What d’ya think?” he says, holding the sketch up for the mother to see. She examines the sketch, which is marked by raindrops. “Where her buttons?” she asks. Reed looks perplexed. “On her shirt,” she says, pointing to her daughter. Reed looks over. He’s missed the shirt’s buttons, so he draws them in, and because of the rain he charges the mother five dollars instead of the usual seven.

  “I’m ready to get outta here,” Reed tells me after a couple of hours. Business is slow. We walk north on King Drive, stopping occasionally to watch a high school marching band, then the Broken Arrow Riding Club (a collection of African-American horsemen and -women), then a flatbed truck bearing Jesse Jackson and members of his Operation PUSH, and finally a float of black owners of McDonald’s franchises.

  We head west on 45th Street, toward what used to be the Robert Taylor Homes, the complex where Reed grew up. It is now a vast tract of open land. Reed refers to it simply as “what was.”

  This is a city in motion, a place of passages. Chicago’s public-housing high-rises have long stood as cinderblock monuments to our disregard—some might say outright hostility—toward the poor. When the bulk of the high-rises were built, in the 1950s and 1960s, white aldermen didn’t want them in their neighborhoods, and so they were placed at the edge of already existing ghettos; because real estate was in short supply, they reached upward to the heavens. As a result, public housing served as a bulwark to segregation: For decades, these buildings have symbolized America’s disdain for its less fortunate.

  But there’s been a remarkable turn of events in the city that Nelson Algren once described as so audacious that it dared to “roll boulevards down out of pig-wallows and roll its dark river uphill.” If promises are kept and plans met, all of Chicago’s eighty-two public-housing family high-rises will be gone by 2010, having fallen to the wrecking ball. Erase the slate and start anew. It’s the equivalent of tearing down a city with the population of Des Moines; at its peak in the early 1990s, the Chicago Housing Authori
ty housed two hundred thousand people. Plans are in place to build new homes in their stead, some of which will be allotted for those displaced, others selling, at least in one gentrifying community, for upwards of four hundred thousand dollars. This redevelopment strategy is presented as a grand gesture to right past wrongs: to build mixed-income communities, to integrate, if not by race, at least by class.

  It’s also a classic instance of Chicago’s daring and incautious nature. On the one hand, these mixed-income communities may well be like phoenixes rising from the ashes, a far more palatable alternative to the ghettos they have replaced. On the other hand, it is unclear what will happen to the thousands of poor families who once lived in these housing complexes, and for whom there’s not room in the newly constructed homes. In 1963, when Mayor Richard J. Daley declared, “There are no ghettos in Chicago,” most knew better: When you drove into the city from the south, you were faced with the two-mile-long curtain of high-rises; the squalor was impossible to ignore. Now, many of Chicago’s poor families are being scattered to the winds, finding their way outward to the city’s rim of equally troubled neighborhoods and to a ring of already struggling suburbs; this movement mirrors what has happened in European cities, such as Paris, where the poor, like a wreath, encircle the urban centers. For most, they will be no better off, and now completely out of sight, an urban problem that has been exported and dispensed with rather than resolved.

  You might think that the demolition of the projects is bad news for Reed, but, in fact, he’s busier than ever. His patrons are calling on him to replicate the landscapes, the Jesus Christs, and the tombstones in their new residences. But many are also asking for something simpler: a visual memento of the place they used to live. Despite the hellishness of these high-rises, for many they were home.

  After the parade, Reed and I walk back to his apartment in a Dearborn Homes mid-rise which, unlike the surrounding high-rises, will undergo renovation rather than demolition. Reed’s living room is sparsely furnished with a sofa and an easy chair, both covered in plastic sheeting. On the floor is a recently purchased carton of Newports and a case of Miller beer, as well as his television. He lifts the TV and feels underneath for some cash he’s hidden there; he’s going shopping for more paint and an easel. On one wall, I see three nearly identical sketches of a cluster of high-rises; each one is titled simply “Robert Taylor 1962–2000.” The rendering is quite literal, like a photograph, and in fact the neighborhood looks lifeless, which seems odd given the stupefying energy of these high-rises. As I look at the sketches, I realize what’s missing: people. Their absence is not unintentional. “It’s like a ghost town,” he explains.

  Reed sells these for twenty dollars apiece, but he tells me that many want the projects painted on the walls of their new homes. “In the front room,” he tells me. “The first thing you’ll see walking into their house. Can you imagine? The first thing that pops into your mind is, You must have lived in the Robert Taylor Homes or known someone.” His laughter punctuates his thoughts. “And they want everybody to know this.”

  But Reed prefers to dwell on his efforts to expand his customers’ horizons rather than re-creating the past, and so soon he’s pacing back and forth again, talking once more about his fantastical murals. “Go ahead on and give these people something that they could never have in their life,” he tells me. “Give it to them, and it will make them happy.”

  26th Street

  Chicago’s Criminal Courts building is a massive columned structure made of limestone; I’m told that it has the world’s largest collection of felony courtrooms (thirty-four) under one roof. Roughly forty thousand cases are heard here each year, an average of 153 a day. The rush of humanity is staggering. The central bond court, room 101, begins proceedings at one o’clock every afternoon, and it is so backed up with the newly arrested that defendants now appear on video from lockup in the basement. Court officials say that bringing all of them into the courtroom would pose insurmountable security problems, so friends and family members, often with young children, sit on the hard-backed benches and watch their loved ones appear on televisions hanging from the ceiling. The judge goes through the defendant’s past record, then sets a bond. It usually takes a minute, maybe two. One attorney commented, “You can’t help but be overwhelmed by the speed with which things happen here.”

  But for some the wheels of justice turn a little more quickly than for others. Carved into the building’s stone exterior is a single word, VERITAS, and indeed while the truth more often than not eventually comes to light, it is not necessarily pursued with equal vigor in every case. Consider the tale of Police Commander Jon Burge. Over the course of eighteen years, ninety defendants—all of whom had been interrogated by Burge or by a small group of detectives under his command—appeared in various courtrooms here, accused of crimes like arson and murder. Over time, each claimed he had been tortured. Some said they’d been suffocated, a plastic bag or typewriter cover held over their heads until they passed out. Some claimed they’d been given electric shocks, administered by a cattle prod or a field-telephone-like device, their genitals the usual target. Still others said that Burge and his men had played sadistic games with them, placing guns in their mouths. But it took seventeen years before anyone paid attention to these claims, and then only after a dogged local journalist, John Conroy, wouldn’t let the story go. Burge, who has since been dismissed from the police force, is now—twenty-nine years after the first claim—under investigation; a special prosecutor has been appointed to see whether there are grounds to prosecute Burge or any of the officers under his command. Many of those who say they were tortured by Burge and his men remain in prison, though in January 2003 Governor Ryan pardoned and released four of the convicted who were on death row, arguing they were innocent of the crimes to which they’d allegedly given confessions. The goings-on in this building, like my father-in-law’s sculpture of the anvil hanging precariously over the birdfeeder, represent the ultimate juxtaposition of power and fragility.

  The building is known among its regulars as “26th Street,” a nod to its location at the corner of 26th Street and California Avenue, which is seven miles southwest of the Loop, the city’s hub—a rather long distance, given the import of what occurs here. It is, as one lawyer told me, “an island unto itself.” Many people assume that the building was intentionally placed far from the center of things to keep the riffraff away from downtown, but in reality, it’s the result, ironically enough, of questionable dealings. This strip of land was once owned by Anton Cermak, a Bohemian immigrant who was elected mayor in 1931, and while Cermak was president of the Cook County Board, he sold the land to the county, presumably for a profit. (Cermak was assassinated in 1933 while standing next to President Franklin Roosevelt at a political rally in Miami, Florida. It’s fairly well accepted that the lone assassin had meant to kill the president, but many Chicagoans believed—and still do—that Al Capone’s successors had ordered Cermak’s murder because he intended to crack down on the mob so that he might assert his own control over their illicit operations.)

  When someone new moves to Chicago, one of the first places I steer them to is 26th Street. It may well be the most consequential building in the city. It is certainly the liveliest. A lawyer once told me that he found working there addictive—that although he would periodically try cases in the more rarefied atmosphere of the civil courts, he always found his way back. There have been times I’ve gone to 26th Street for a particular trial and ended up spending the day there, wandering from courtroom to courtroom and eavesdropping on conversations in the hallways, like the one a woman was having with her friend on a cell phone. “He got himself a good lawyer,” she told her friend. “He got himself a Jew lawyer. The man is mad.”

  Andrea Lyon is a mad lawyer, which, as the woman on the cell phone intuited about her friend’s attorney, probably explains Lyon’s success as well. In nineteen capital cases, she has saved all of her clients from the electric chair. Lyon i
s an outsized figure: six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and sturdily built. “What does size matter?” you might reasonably ask. But in such a macho environment, trust me, it does. Lyon began practicing in this building as a public defender, in 1978, and at the time she was one of only a handful of women lawyers here; there were no women judges at all. In those early days, one judge stubbornly referred to Lyon alternately as “sir,” “gentleman,” and “Mr. Lyon.” “At first I thought it was a slip of the tongue,” Lyon recalled. “But it became quite pointed. I’d pretend I had this little tape recorder that I’d turn on in the morning and it would say, ‘This is your problem, it’s not my problem. This is your problem, it’s not my problem.’ ” It calmed her down—and Lyon, by her own admission, occasionally needs calming down. One colleague recalls the time a prosecutor, during a break in the courtroom, called Lyon a vile name: Lyon responded by grabbing him by the collar and nearly lifting him off his feet. (It was this reaction, Lyon believes, that finally earned her the respect of her male colleagues.) When I mentioned Lyon’s name to a judge, he smiled. “She can heat things up,” he said.

  Another story that has long made the rounds—and that Lyon confirmed for me—is that many years ago, when Lyon was in law school in Washington, D.C., a man tried to mug her while she was walking home late one night. But when he grabbed her by the arm and reached for her purse, Lyon responded by slugging him and knocking him to the ground, breaking his jaw. “I couldn’t leave him there bleeding,” she said. “So I called an ambulance. I’m such a public defender.”