by Ben Austen
Jerry sometimes bussed tables as well at his uncle Johnny and aunt Pearlie’s restaurant, next to Seward Park. Packed from morning through night with everyone from Irish cops and numbers runners to bus drivers, judges, and ministers, it was like a community roundtable for the ever-changing neighborhood. People his uncle knew from back home in Mississippi would make the journey up to Chicago, and he’d give them a job in the restaurant until they settled into something steadier.
By then Italians and African Americans had been living side by side in the area for decades, mostly peaceably but sometimes not. In 1935, an Italian property owners’ association took it upon itself to try to evict 4,700 black renters from the Near North Side. Father Giambastiani, of Saint Benizi Parish, defended the illegal acts: “The landlords were protecting their property values as they had a right to do.” Although the Sicilians he spoke for were manual laborers or shopkeepers, they’d come to the city and embraced the American dream of owning property. The rate of home ownership for first-generation Italians in Chicago was twice that of native-born whites. When the CHA was clearing the Little Hell slum in the forties to make way for the Cabrini rowhouses, a group of Italians refused to sell. They didn’t want to sacrifice personally for the government’s notion of the greater civic good. Initially, the Cabrini rowhouses were to cover fifty-five acres, extending all the way from Chicago Avenue to Division Street. But the CHA had to scale the development back to sixteen acres when it couldn’t secure the land.
The chairman of the CHA under Elizabeth Wood was an African American architect and businessman named Robert Taylor. One of the few black officials in city government, he had helped found a savings and loan on the South Side, the rare banking establishment in Chicago to offer home loans to minority borrowers. He shared Wood’s belief that the integration of public housing was a practical necessity as well as a moral one. A quarter million Chicago families lacked safe and sanitary housing, with the greatest demand coming from the city’s segregated black neighborhoods. Federal law dictated that new public housing developments couldn’t change the existing racial makeup of a neighborhood, only match it. The CHA had at first avoided the trickiness of this “neighborhood composition rule.” Two New Deal–era sites inherited by the agency were on vacant land in all-white neighborhoods, and a third included a smattering of black families relegated to a corner of the complex with its own separate stairwell.
When the Cabrini rowhouses were completed, the surrounding area was 80 percent white and 20 percent black, and so the small development held to that quota. Black and Italian children played together in the parks and at the YMCA. They attended the same schools. Neighbors of different races joined up for block parties and the huge feast-day celebrations of Saint Dominic and Saint Benizi. “With an integrated project we were all one big family,” a white rowhouse occupant recollected in When Public Housing Was Paradise. “It was a real village.” The Defender covered the opening of the rowhouses with uplifting images of middle-class domesticity. A black family of four enjoying a first meal in their dining room. Two Cabrini mothers, one white, one black, in similar blouses and long skirts, their shoulders touching as they gaze into an oven; the caption explains that they are joined for a child’s twelfth birthday and that the black mother “is probably giving advice on how the birthday cake should be cooked, or perhaps she is simply kibitzing as the women will do.”
Father Giambastiani delivered a prayer at the Cabrini rowhouses’ dedication. Within weeks, however, he was writing letters to Elizabeth Wood, complaining that the social experiment there had failed because blacks were being placed “on the same level and house to house with the White people: this is being resented by all and I must add, in order to be candid with you, that I don’t like it either.” Italian property owners lobbied the housing agency to segregate African American renters to the southwest corner of the development—“to preserve the character and values of the neighborhoods on the north side.” Giambastiani began to advertise the parochial school of Saint Benizi as an all-white alternative to the integrated Jenner; the neighborhood’s two public parks set up separate hours for white and black children to use the facilities. Some in the community revived the terror of their parent’s childhoods, calling themselves the Black Hand and attacking their neighbors. In April 1943, a group of whites shot into a Cabrini rowhouse occupied by a black family, and several hundred people took to the streets as fights broke out. During the next months, more police were stationed at Cabrini than at any other Chicago housing development, as city officials feared that the Near North Side might erupt into a full-fledged race riot. The Defender, hopeful, reported that amid the turmoil two hundred children at the rowhouses elected a fourteen-year-old black youth to head their junior government, the headline declaring, “White Kids Rebuff Hate, Elect Negro Boy ‘Mayor.’”
The neat columns of the Cabrini rowhouses were bordered to the south by Chicago Avenue and to the west by Montgomery Ward’s gargantuan, two-million-square-foot warehouse that curved where the Chicago River bowed. Directly to the east, several of the seven- and ten-story Cabrini high-rises were positioned like chess pieces on a single tract of land hardly bigger than a square block; across Oak Street to the north, nineteen- and ten-story towers rose up like a wall. The Reds lined Larrabee heading north, and Division going west, and Cleveland heading back south to Oak, completing a four-sided bulwark that formed around the parkland between the buildings. Many rowhouse residents saw the high-rises not as an extension of their community but as something separate. The distinctions weren’t merely design related.
By 1950 the population of the twenty-five blocks cleared to make way for the Cabrini Extension towers had jumped to 80 percent black, as older Italians moved out and younger families moved in. The CHA touted one of the new Cabrini high-rises as its “International Building,” reporting that some 262 African American, Armenian, Chinese, Danish, Eskimo, German, Indian, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Polish, Puerto Rican, Scottish, Swedish, and Turkish families live there “in harmony, in friendship and in peace.” But overall, about 90 percent of the 1,900 families who moved into the fifteen high-rises were African American, the majority of them like the Wilsons and the Butlers—two-parent, working-class, and desperately in need of adequate housing. In Dolores’s building, she knew of only one white family; the wife’s name was also Dolores, and she used to sell her blood at Mount Sinai Hospital to make a little extra money.
Unsettled by the shifting demographics, many white renters quit their rowhouse apartments, with a great number of them moving to the western suburbs. “I saw the atmosphere go down in Cabrini,” said a white mother who lived in the rowhomes with her family until the first high-rises opened. “I saw it change from sort of an ideal little community into a place that you wanted to get out of.” The CHA no longer gave war workers or veterans preference in the developments, and the agency felt compelled to push out families who exceeded the reduced income limits. “Be proud to move out, so that a lower-income family can have the advantage that you have had,” Elizabeth Wood told better-off families during their evictions. But the agency had difficulty finding other white tenants to replace those leaving the Cabrini rowhouses. The CHA had upped the quota of black residents allowed at the low-rise development, though only slightly, and it submitted to the demands of other occupants and kept sections of the rowhouses solidly white. Wood even had the agency print up tens of thousands of applications for the Cabrini rowhouses and distribute them among potential white residents. Brochures featured white children playing in yards and on the swings outside low-rise apartments, a picture of suburban comforts at inner-city public housing costs. But the efforts weren’t enough. Whites made up less than half the rowhouse population by the early fifties. Units sat empty, while hundreds of black families who had passed the CHA’s screening weren’t considered for them. Amid a citywide housing shortage, Wood and Taylor found themselves defending a quota system that seemed unethical if also necessary. Wood believed, not inaccuratel
y, that there was a racial tipping point at which whites would view most inner-city public housing as an entitlement meant solely “for Negroes.” By the start of the 1960s, white families occupied only forty-two of the nearly six hundred units in the Cabrini rowhouses.
The Butlers were eventually forced to leave their apartment in 1117 N. Cleveland. Jerry and Curtis Mayfield formed a band with a couple of friends who’d made the journey to Chicago from Chattanooga, Tennessee. As the Roosters, they were performing at a talent show at Washburne Trade School when a promoter named Eddie Thomas heard them and promised he could make them into stars. Thomas explained that the group’s name sounded too country. They settled on the Impressions. Always leave an impression. In 1958 they recorded their first song, on the South Side’s Record Row. Butler had written the tune a couple of years earlier, when he was a teenager gazing out his high-rise window, a kid pining for idealized love. It had no hook and no real sing-along parts. “A poem set to music,” he’d say. “For Your Precious Love” reached number eleven on the Billboard charts. The young men played the Apollo Theater in New York, and Butler received a royalty check of a couple hundred dollars.
The CHA soon contacted the mother of Jerry “the Iceman” Butler, saying the family’s joint income exceeded the maximum allowance for public housing. The Butlers moved to a house on the South Side. Curtis Mayfield stayed on in the Cabrini rowhouses for several more years, selling cigars in office buildings in the Loop before his own music career took off again and he could afford an apartment of his own in a new high-end complex just ten blocks away.
WHEN THE HOUSING Act of 1937 was being debated, it was opposed by every real estate trade group, by builders, suppliers, US Chambers of Commerce, property owners’ associations, and the Departments of Commerce and the Interior. Eight years earlier, the department store scion Marshall Field III opened one of Chicago’s first subsidized housing developments a couple of blocks north of the future Cabrini rowhouse site. The Marshall Field Garden Apartments included 628 low-income dwellings as well as a progressive demonstration school, workrooms, and storefronts on the ground floor. But the entire complex was privately funded, the charity intended also to attract additional commercial and residential development to the surrounding Italian neighborhood.
State-run housing was seen as something altogether different. Critics of the day denounced it as government overreach, with the handouts maligned as anticapitalist, socialist, and generally un-American. A public housing development, the very idea of it, clashed with the country’s exalted sense of home ownership, with a national ethos wrapped up in visions of the frontiersman, the log cabin, and the self-made entrepreneur. Although the subsidy was reserved only for stable families with modest incomes—the “deserving poor”—the ceiling on what residents could earn was said to discourage hard work, acting as a sap on initiative and pluck. Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, from 1943, dramatized the backlash against Roosevelt’s call for a deeper social contract of shared responsibility. The hero of the novel is an architect of a public housing complex who becomes outraged when he returns from a trip to discover that his bare-bones high-rise has been compromised to include “the expense of incomprehensible features.” Among what he deems nonessential aesthetics are blue-painted metal balconies (“You gotta give ’em a place to sit on in the fresh air,” he’s told), a gymnasium demanded by the social worker in charge of tenant selection, extra doorways and windows, an awning, decorative brickwork, and a carved relief sculpture above the building’s main entrance. In an act that is portrayed as a valiant defense of his convictions, the architect dynamites the entire building.
Like all the New Deal programs, public housing wasn’t positioned as a renunciation of the for-profit capitalist system; instead, it was a massive government intervention meant to save it. Hiring under the Public Works Administration, relief for farmers, aid to senior citizens through Social Security, food stamps for the urban poor, and public housing—these reforms treated poverty not as a personal moral failing but as a widespread social and economic injustice that the country was obligated to right. The programs were also intended to jump-start the economy, creating jobs and resuscitating the industrial sector through large-scale civic construction projects. In 1949, Congress passed legislation that promised to fund 810,000 additional units of public housing. President Harry Truman, in signing the bill into law, declared that it was the nation’s collective duty to provide “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” But it was voted into law only after being packaged as part of an expansive urban renewal bill that promised to revive cities and rebuild their infrastructure. In the House of Representatives, the last of several efforts to strip the bill of its public housing provisions came within five votes of passing. Catherine Bauer, the crusader who helped will the nation’s public housing program into being, would regret that the entitlement was “continuously controversial, not dead but never more than half alive.”
The CHA, which campaigned to get 40,000 of the new public housing units built in Chicago, argued that modernizing the worst neighborhoods would not only benefit the poor but also restore the city to profitability. “A Chicago slum district costs the taxpayers six times as much annually as is paid back to the city in taxes,” the agency advertised. The CHA estimated that it could build as many as 150,000 units of public housing without taking a single customer away from the standard private-sector housing market. In a further appeal to self-interest, the agency added that quality low-rent homes would keep the poor from seeking better housing elsewhere, such as in your neighborhood.
Maybe most tellingly, the same Depression-era legislation that funded the country’s first public housing developments also created the federally insured private home loan. With a Federal Housing Administration guarantee, banks were able to offer large home mortgages to people, paid off in small increments over an unprecedented thirty years, allowing families to put down as little as 10 percent of a house’s cost. With this revolution in home financing, families could afford bigger and better homes, and developers and designers began to build homes in anticipation of the growing demand. The subsidies to the speculative real estate market dwarfed the outlays to public housing and to any programs offering rental assistance. Here was the American dream in practice: a select number of the nation’s ill-housed got public housing in cities; those better off were able to buy homes, increasingly in the suburbs, with the government taking on the risk. African Americans—who’d been owned as property a little more than two generations earlier and then had their own property systematically taken away from them in the Jim Crow South—found themselves excluded from a gamed mortgage system that allowed others to accumulate wealth with little investment and with minimized risk.
The most virulent opposition to public housing in Chicago came from white working-class families who felt trapped in the racially changing city. With the flow of migrants from the South surging after the Second World War, Realtors used shady blockbusting tactics, surreptitiously moving a single black family into an area, then drumming up fears among white neighbors of decreasing property values and a growing threat of crime, to buy up their houses on the cheap. Many white Chicagoans took advantage of the new federally insured mortgages to speed out to all-white suburbs. Those who couldn’t afford to move were desperate to preserve whatever tenuous hold they had on their neighborhoods. Their parents or grandparents had come to Chicago from Europe, and they’d made a home in the city, buying a bungalow among families much like themselves. They believed all of that was now in jeopardy. There were nearly five hundred outbreaks of inter-racial violence in Chicago between 1945 and 1950, with 350 of them directly tied to fights over housing.
At the CHA’s Airport Homes, near Midway Airport on the West Side, white residents from the neighborhood vandalized the public housing development in 1946 at the mere rumor that black World War II veterans might be allowed to live there. Several men strong-armed their way into the housing office, sto
le keys, and moved white families into vacant units. When the CHA did rent one of the subsidized apartments to a black family weeks later, the husband was a decorated veteran, one of the 175,000 returning from the war who applied for government housing assistance in Chicago, and he was selected as carefully for the occasion as Jackie Robinson was for his integration of Major League Baseball the following spring. As a precaution, the CHA brought in the family during the day, when most men from the community were away at work. But white women took up the charge, hurling curses and dirt and bricks. Similar protests occurred the following summer when the CHA tried to integrate the Fernwood Homes, except that the mobs in the South Side neighborhood of Roseland were even larger, reaching five thousand. White youth pulled black drivers from passing cars and beat them. Local churches and community groups endorsed the violence that continued for weeks, and the neighborhood’s alderman condemned not the perpetrators but the CHA for including Roseland in these “ideological experiments.”
The largest of the city’s public housing race riots occurred at the Trumbull Homes, in the South Side neighborhood of South Deering. In 1953, a light-skinned black woman applied for a public housing unit in Chicago, and the housing authority, assuming she was white, accidentally integrated the development of three-story apartment buildings and rowhomes. South Deering was a working-class area of Italians, Poles, and Slavs south of the encroaching Black Belt but north of all-black Altgeld Gardens, separated from it by Lake Calumet and the surrounding steel mills. When the woman showed up with her husband and children, the resulting protests lasted for months, with locals setting off homemade bombs and crowds burning down businesses. A community newspaper wrote about the “savage, lustful, immoral standards of the Southern Negro,” submitting that South Deering might consider accepting black residents only after black people were civilized; in the meantime, the white neighborhood would defend itself, while other “spineless communities” were “raped, robbed, and murdered.”
