In 2009, developer Daniel McCaffery received approval from city hall to build apartments and a shopping center atop South Works’s slag. McCaffery had donated a lot of money to Mayor Daley. A decade earlier, the Hispanic Democratic Organization had broken every other law in the Illinois electoral code to elect Daley’s man to the city council, because the mayor wanted to decide what would replace the mill and who would build it. The Daley family’s campaign to bring South Chicago under its political control had resulted in a lucrative concession for a well-connected Irish builder. Even in global Chicago, that’s how things work.
When built out over thirty years, Chicago Lakeside will be the site of 13,576 homes and 17.5 million square feet of stores and offices. The North Slip will become a sailboat marina. The rocky verge of the peninsula, a bathing beach. I visited the marketing center in the old company credit union, the only one of South Works’s 160 buildings that hadn’t been rubbled. In the middle of the showroom floor, surrounded by Plexiglas panels, was a diorama of a quayside urban village. Model-railroad trees, in rows laid out by a Platonic arborist, followed the curve of a lengthened Lake Shore Drive. Two-inch-tall towers faced the water. I watched a four-minute promotional video narrated by TV newsman Bill Kurtis, who also narrated the movie Anchorman. The only greenery was indoors. Outdoors, South Works was the most khaki landscape east of the hundredth meridian. Since U.S. Steel had let nature take its course on this unnatural peninsula, a few trees had risen out of the topsoil, but they were skinny, shapeless teenagers. Mostly, the brown dust grew brittle, coppery weeds that bent stiffly in the unbroken lake winds. Far off, a coal-burning plant on the Illinois-Indiana line, a soon-to-be demolished remnant of smoggy industry, cast a locomotive cloud into the wind. Beyond, the blue silhouettes of the Indiana steel mills were piled atop the horizon-shaped curve of Lake Michigan.
Nasutsa Mabwa, the project development manager, took me for a ride around the site, her black SUV rumbling over roadbeds laid out in expectation of asphalt. Her mission, she said, was to restore the middle class to South Chicago, by persuading people who could afford to live anywhere to move down to this poor, forgotten South Side neighborhood. It was only a twenty-minute drive from downtown.
“It’s going to uplift the entire South Side of Chicago,” Mabwa predicted. “No one else has the access to the water. There’s no land like this left. We’re kind of reinventing an image that has been tarnished, and you have the media fixated on shootings and crimes. There’s shootings all over Chicago. Of course we’re in it because it’s an opportunity for revenue. We’re not going to do it for free, but after you do all of your economics, you realize that, ‘Wow, this is kind of a social transformation project. This is socioeconomic change.’ And then you begin to think, ‘This is something that really matters. It was good, solid middle-class families, and now it’s just in big disrepair.’”
A daughter of Kenyan immigrants, Mabwa had even bigger plans for Lakeside than her bosses: she wanted to bring the Obama Presidential Library there. The University of Chicago, where Obama taught law, is only three miles away. It has an academic claim, but Lakeside has a historic claim, since Obama came to Chicago to work in neighborhoods impoverished by the steel mill closings. If the mills hadn’t failed, Obama would not have become president.
We drove past a desert-colored wall that paralleled the North Slip. The ore wall, where taconite and limestone were piled to await the furnaces, was, like the Great Pyramid, an artifact that had outlived its makers. Like the smokestacks at Homestead’s Waterfront Mall, the ore wall would be preserved as an industrial memento. It was also too big to tear down. There would be another reminder that Lakeside sat on the bones of a steel mill: no basements. They can’t be dug in slag.
No one has moved into Lakeside yet, but in the summer of ’11, a bicycle club began building a velodrome, and the Dave Matthews Band held a three-day jam festival atop the slag, drawing the biggest crowd to South Works since twenty thousand worked there during World War II.
NEIL BOSANKO, the steelworker’s son who ran for alderman, had spent all his six decades in South Chicago, a lifespan evenly divided between years when Prometheus was the neighborhood’s patron god, and years when it was Chaos. As president of the neighborhood chamber of commerce, Bosanko had seen Commercial Avenue’s department stores replaced with taquerias, fruiterias, and Nigerian groceries. Only immigrants would move to South Chicago. They had no choice but to live in places Americans had polluted and discarded. Bosanko, a Jew, had grown up among his fellow ethnics but was now one only of a few hundred remaining whites. He had raised eight foster sons and kept them all away from the gangs, except one boy who was doing time for murder. He’d run a chili parlor, because chili was fast, greasy food people could afford in South Chicago. Bosanko had visited Chicago Lakeside’s marketing center and hoped to spend the final third of his life in a neighborhood ruled by Plutus, the god of prosperity. The Rust Belt era had never really ended in South Chicago. The outside world hadn’t seen this neighborhood since the Bluesmobile jumped the 95th Street bridge in The Blues Brothers. Finally, it was about to become part of global Chicago.
“I really think that the city is treating us with respect,” he said. “You will have mixed income. People are pretty free to talk about gentrification, but I want to see police here. I want to see three-hundred-thousand-dollar people moving in here again.”
Bosanko envisioned a streetcar running down Commercial Avenue, just like the streetcar that carried workers to South Works. Except this one would bring urban adventurers to his neighborhood for pozole and tofu. That would be South Chicago’s niche in the global city: providing an international culinary experience to young professionals.
Would South Chicago be as prosperous in Bosanko’s old age as in his youth? Were those three middle-age decades an indigent aberration in the lifespan of a great neighborhood, like a spell of unemployment? Bosanko never lived to find out. Before the first brick was laid at Lakeside, he died of cancer.
11.
“Nature Always Bats Last”
The summer of 1901 was muggy, sweaty, sticky. In Brooklyn, the tenement dwellers slept on fire escapes, the slum kids freed rainbows of spray from hydrants, and the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company, which printed the popular humor magazine Judge, found the humidity affected the quality of its product. Paper expanded. Colors bled together. The printer’s deadlines meant it could not afford to slow the presses or reprint heat-spoiled runs.
Sackett-Wilhelms took its problem to the Buffalo Forge Company, a manufacturer of blowers and heaters, where it was assigned to Willis H. Carrier, an engineer just out of Cornell University.
Carrier’s solution was to circulate cold water through heating coils. From Weather Bureau tables, he selected the dew-point temperature at which air has the right amount of moisture for the printing process. He then balanced the temperature of the coil surface and the rate of air flow to pull the air temperature down to the selected dew-point temperature. Carrier called his invention the Buffalo Air Washer and Humidifier, but we know it as air-conditioning.
Before air-conditioning, the northeastern quadrant of the United States was the most climatically desirable corner of the country. Yale geographer Ellsworth Huntington determined that the weather in the mid-Atlantic and the lower Great Lakes was most conducive to hard work and good health. “We are frequently told that the Riviera or Southern California has an ideal climate,” Huntington wrote in his 1915 book Civilization and Climate. But then he noted, “for most people, the really essential thing to life is the ordinary work of every day … Hence [the cold-weather cities] are the ones which people will eventually choose in the largest numbers.”
In Huntington’s day, the region we now call the Rust Belt controlled the nation’s industry, its finances, and its politics. Between the Civil War and World War II, almost every president came from somewhere between Chicago and Boston. But the air conditioner made it possible to export the invigorating North
ern climate, without the dreary clouds and the snow. The race to the Sun Belt was on. In 1966, Texas became the first state in which half the homes were air-conditioned. As Carrier’s own official biography put it, “a place like Houston could only be tolerable with air-conditioning.” Before air-conditioning, Florida was the least populous Southern state, a marginally habitable peninsula of humid swamps, hard-packed beaches, alligators, rum smugglers, and Seminoles. In his essay “The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture,” historian Raymond Arsenault wrote that air-conditioning made factory work tolerable in the South, reduced infant mortality, eliminated malaria, and allowed developers to build skyscrapers and apartment blocks. By urbanizing and industrializing Dixie, air-conditioning lifted the Old Confederacy out of its century-long post–Civil War funk. By the time this book is published, Florida will be the third-most-populous state, having surpassed New York, birthplace of air-conditioning.
When Carrier started his namesake company, he located the headquarters and the factory in Syracuse. From 1960 to the turn of the century, the proportion of American homes with air-conditioning increased from one-eighth to five-sixths. That’s luxury to necessity in two generations. You’d think this would have made Syracuse a wealthy city. In fact, it had the opposite effect. At its peak, Carrier employed eight thousand workers there. But in 1999, the company closed its centrifugal chiller factory—and moved the jobs to North Carolina. Four years later, it shut down the container refrigeration plant and the compressor plant—and moved the jobs to Georgia. You can hardly blame Carrier. The company was only following the market it had created. Southerners buy more air conditioners, so shipping costs are lower. Labor costs are lower, as well. Air-conditioning has not changed the South’s ancestral conservatism. In the B.C. of A/C, when a Northern city was the only practical location for a factory, companies were forced to make deals with stubborn union bosses, who had the support of liberal Northern congressmen. But their population of such politicians has been much reduced as a result of air-conditioning. (New York has lost seventeen congressmen since the window unit became available, while Florida has gained twenty-three).
This is the irony of Syracuse: it popularized the product that caused its own demise, and contributed to the demise of the entire Northeastern United States. A century after Willis Carrier’s brainstorm, the city that once called itself the Air-Conditioning Capital of the World had a new distinction: it was losing young people at a faster rate than any get-out-of-Dodge hometown in the United States. (Besides the factory closings, it doesn’t help that Syracuse, which collects flakes from the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, is the snowiest American city outside the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It regularly beats out Buffalo and Rochester for the “Golden Snowball,” awarded each year to Western New York’s snowiest city.) The defections were so serious that the loyal twentysomethings were trying to lure their classmates home with a repatriation program called “Come Home to Syracuse.” That was the reason I first visited Syracuse, in the summer of 2005.
HAMELIN AFTER THE PIED PIPER’S CONCERT. Boston during Spring Break. Destin, Florida. These are cities abandoned to the elderly. Syracuse did not appear to be such a sexless, colorless, noiseless place. Its Federal Plaza was crowded with what must have been every remaining resident of childbearing age. A giant banner sagged between concrete pillars: “UPDOWNTOWNERS PARTY IN THE PLAZA.” The Updowntowners, downtown Syracuse boosters, were throwing a tremendous blowout. Twenty- and thirtysomethings were so coveted they were encouraged to drink in public on a Wednesday night. I bypassed the portable bar (Coors $4) and bought a plastic cup of wine.
At thirty-eight, I was at the senior end of the bell curve, but my clothes matched. Like everyone else’s, they were from Old Navy. The party uniform was a postcollegiate, premarital get-up of shorts and flip-flops for the men, frilly tank tops for the women. On the steps of the Federal Building, Shelley and the Barndogs played an FM radio revue: “Back in the USSR” (sixties), “I’m Your Captain” (seventies), “Steve McQueen” (two thousands). I looked around for someone who could tell me what it was really like to be a young person in Syracuse, because I knew I’d been penciled in for a PR whitewash the next morning, when I was scheduled to meet the board of Come Home to Syracuse on the nineteenth floor of the city’s tallest building. I ruled out women. There was more flirting going on here than at a Jane Austen ball. My notebook would look like a pickup prop. After the band stopped playing and the partiers scattered, I met Chris and Jimbo. Both were twenty-seven. Both had come home to Syracuse after flailing in bigger cities.
“This is a good town if you’re a cop, a teacher, a doctor, or a lawyer,” Jimbo said, counting the options on his fingers. Since leaving the navy, he’d been working as a custodian while studying education, hoping to break into one of the big-four local professions.
Chris had worked as a sous chef in Atlanta but came back to Syracuse “to pay some bills, and because I couldn’t stand the fucking rednecks down there. I think the Confederate Flag should be illegal. They tried to overthrow the government. People would give me a hard time when they heard my accent. I almost got in so many fights. I was talking to a guy in a bar, and he rolled up his sleeve to show me a tattoo that said ‘Fuck the North.’ This is a guy I might have been friends with.”
In Atlanta, Chris had earned $16 an hour. In Syracuse, he drove a produce truck for $11.75. The work was seasonal, so he needed to find a winter job.
“This town is like a magnet,” he spat. “It keeps drawing you back.”
I thought about the REM song “Rockville.” (“Don’t go back to Rockville / And waste another year.”) I’d thought about that song a lot when I was twenty-five years old in Lansing, too.
“It’s a college town,” Jimbo concluded. “They really fly the orange here.” He was referring to Syracuse University’s team colors. “It used to be a blue-collar town, but none of those jobs pay now. There’s nothing for you here unless you’re in college or you’re married. I know a few people who moved here.”
“People who went to college don’t come back.” Chris said. “They stay the place they went to, or they go somewhere else. Upstate New York is a dying area. I want to move to Colorado.”
THE NEXT MORNING, before my appointment, I went for a walk along Salina Street, in downtown Syracuse. Redbrick towers shaded the chilly sidewalk. Syracuse’s architecture is as Roman as its name: austere, classical, imposing, built to impress, not welcome. The Weighlock Building, marooned on a city street after the Erie Canal was filled in, could have been an Upper Fifth Avenue mansion. Half the storefronts on Salina were empty, unpainted for years. The other half were occupied by discount stores: CVS, Rainbow, Athlete’s Foot, Oriental Mart Salon. Young men lingered on the sidewalk. A tramp with a dingy beard approached. “Where’s the shelter at?” he asked me.
A few men in suits strolled briskly through this lower-class galleria, like smart yachts trying to catch a wind that would hurry them through polluted waters. I drifted down to the Landmark Theatre, the inevitable empty movie house. A marble-and-wood ticket booth was curtained with burgundy velvet. At my feet was the Syracuse Walk of Fame. I recognized many of the names beneath the tarnished brass stars—L. Frank Baum, Rod Serling, Grace Jones, Bob Costas, Dick Clark—but Peanuts Hucko must have been obscure even to locals. (He was a big-band clarinetist.) The message stamped in the sidewalk: Syracuse was a place to be from. In a few minutes, I would learn why anyone would want to stay.
“OUR MOST DUBIOUS DISTINCTION is that the Syracuse MSA has lost more of this age bracket than any other community in the country,” the woman with the plaited brown hair was saying.
“It’s perceived lack of opportunities,” said the husky one with the wedding band. “Because of the relative size of the geographic region, someone who’s from Syracuse may not know about job opportunities in Oswego.”
“There are great opportunities for a young person our age who wants to be actively involved in the co
mmunity,” the blond prince asserted. “It’s a perfect laboratory for a Northeastern city that’s gone through its rough times and is poised to redevelop.”
Emma, Michael, and Ben were all twenty-six years old, but they already dressed and talked like the civic elders they would one day become. We were in a nineteenth-story conference room, antiseptically chilled by Carrier. Through a dusty window, I could see the green platter of the Onondaga Valley—a bed of trees garnished with brick cupolas and glowing glass towers.
Their pitch went on for an hour. Then Michael looked at Ben: “Should we give him the tour?”
“Let’s give him the tour.”
“We’ll give you the tour. Then we’ll take you to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. It’s the best barbecue you’ll ever have.”
Michael and Ben led me across Salina Street, to the spot where the Erie Canal once ran through Syracuse. In commemoration, a city block had been filled in with water, as though the hydrants had burst. Children waded calf-deep, like brown cranes. The water bleakly reflected a statue of Christopher Columbus, hero to the local Italians.
(“You’d be hard-pressed to find another city where the body of water it was built around is gone,” Ben would tell me later. “It was filled in 1920, because the canal was not looked at as a viable means of trade. If they had been thinking ahead eighty years, they might have thought of the benefits of having a waterway running through the middle of town as a quality-of-life amenity.”)
Nothin' but Blue Skies Page 27
