by Ben Austen
In 1947, amid the ongoing racial upheaval, the city’s Democratic machine forced out Mayor Edward Kelly. Kelly had allowed Elizabeth Wood to keep the CHA free of the machine’s patronage hires and preferential contracts, and he tolerated an agency agenda often at odds with the interests of local ward bosses. The new mayor, Martin Kennelly, was picked by the regular Democratic organization because he could be counted on by the city’s power brokers. Some progressive housing reformers at that time believed it was preferable to build new public housing on vacant land on the outskirts of the city, where the net gain of homes would be greatest and the poor could start anew; others insisted on building atop existing slums, so the city’s most deplorable housing would be replaced. Elizabeth Wood and Robert Taylor wanted to spread around new sites, apportioning the working poor across a number of different neighborhoods so that the entire city shouldered the responsibility of housing the disadvantaged. But under Kennelly, the city council was given the final say on the selection of public housing sites. Spurred on by the racial fears of their constituents, aldermen rejected every site proposed by the CHA that was in a white neighborhood. When the council debated the issue for four consecutive days in 1950, hundreds of residents from white areas were bussed in to fill the gallery. Of the 12,500 new units to go up in Chicago, just 2,000 of them would be constructed on empty land; the remaining 10,500 were built in black slums or as extensions of existing public housing developments. The CHA reluctantly accepted these terms. Any housing was deemed better than further delays or no new homes at all.
From that point on, the agency no longer bothered to suggest sites for its developments beyond existing ghettoes. Robert Taylor, humbled, resigned. And while Wood stayed on until 1954, when she was forced out, she had been stripped of her independence. “I was so undercut politically that I was feeble, I was floundering around,” she said later. “We no longer had power to select where the projects were going to go, and we had very little space to work with, so we had to go to the high-rises.”
Of the thirty-three housing projects built in Chicago in the coming two decades—a total of 168 high-rise buildings—all save one went up in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood or an area far along in its transition from white to black. Public housing still represented a major upgrade for families in these decaying neighborhoods. Yet large public housing complexes now had the effect of solidifying the boundaries between black and white Chicago in superblocks detached from the street grid and in towers of concrete and steel. In Arnold Hirsch’s history of this pivotal reconfiguring of the city, The Making of the Second Ghetto, he calls the site selection of Chicago’s high-rise public housing a “domestic containment policy.” Wood complained at a public forum soon after her firing, “It is the will of politicians to keep Negroes where they are.”
DOLORES WILSON
DOLORES ALWAYS CLAIMED she didn’t want to take on any additional responsibilities, that she preferred to be a spectator. But that just wasn’t true. In her own subdued way, she’d end up running six different committees. She showed up for the PTA meetings at Jenner, her children’s school, and found herself elected treasurer and later president. She served on her building council, planning activities for the teens and younger children in the tower. The tenants celebrated the “birthdays” of their high-rises at Cabrini, the date coinciding with their address, and Dolores helped throw a big party in the 1117 N. Cleveland rec room every November 17. She attended Holy Family Lutheran, a small cube of a church across the field from her apartment, joining its board, and started volunteering with an organization that helped the formerly incarcerated manage their return to free society.
She spent many hours as well at the Lower North Center. Her children attended camp there and used it for dance and music classes and sports. The center hosted the parties of the local high schools, a parents’ group, and a social club that showed movies and took residents on fishing trips and to a Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario. Adults gathered there for acting lessons, Hawaiian-themed teas, and for lectures by visiting scholars—the African American historian John Hope Franklin, an expert on slavery and Reconstruction, spoke to Cabrini residents about the two-century struggle for freedom and equality. When Bobby Kennedy showed up at Cabrini in 1963 as part of his brother’s presidential commission on juvenile delinquency, he walked the buildings and shot pool with teens at the Lower North Center. “The feminine part of the staff agreed to keep the hand that the Attorney General shook unwashed,” noted the North Side Observer, a regular feature in the Chicago Defender that was written in the decorous style of a high-society registrar. Dolores Wilson was present at many of the affairs chronicled in these pages. She helped out with everything from back-to-school giveaways to Christmas bazaars, raffles, and dances. She was a soloist in a “musical extravaganza” and was among the diligent volunteers of a PTA rummage sale to whom the newspaper offered a “low bow” of gratitude for being “on hand into the wee hours of the morning with the ‘detested sorting.’”
The Cabrini Extension high-rises were a low-income development of some ten thousand people crammed together on isolated plazas set within a historic slum. There were bound to be issues. Shortly after the Wilsons moved in, drivers delivering milk among the fifteen towers complained that teens were sneaking into their trucks and stealing bottles. In the enclosed stairwells and elevators, hidden from sight, children wrote over the walls. Laundry machines were broken and mailboxes bashed so they couldn’t open. In one of the high-rises neighboring the Wilsons, two men on the seventeenth floor robbed another man of his television and then, as a daily reported, “shot him in the eye for no reason.” On the corner of Division and Larrabee, on the northwestern edge of the complex, a mass of teenagers brawled.
But Dolores felt like her six-flat on the South Side had experienced more disturbances than the entirety of her nineteen-story high-rise. And at Cabrini, she and her neighbors got together to try to deal with problems. They formed self-protection clubs and patrolled the laundry rooms, elevators, and corridors. Residents petitioned the housing authority to enforce rules, respond to maintenance calls, and support programs that engaged the large number of children living there. They started a law-and-order commission and demanded that the police carry out foot patrols and do something about the drunks from the taverns on Chicago Avenue and the roaming prostitutes from the warehouse district to the south. Saul Alinsky, the father of the Chicago style of community organizing, came to the auditorium at Saint Philip Benizi school to advise a new tenant leadership group that called itself A Better Cabrini Organization. Alinsky told the Cabrini residents what they’d already realized from their experiences: they would have to show power in numbers if they hoped to exert influence over the CHA, the police, and city hall.
MAYOR RICHARD J. Daley, his son will tell you, never aspired to have public housing high-rises built in Chicago. “It’s a big fallacy that he wanted all this. It’s totally bullshit. He knew more about it than anyone else. He knew this would make them like a prison.” Richard M. Daley, the mayor of Chicago from 1989 to 2011, has declared this many times when asked about the legacy of the city’s public housing, his eyes fixed on the pages of a US Senate hearing transcript from July 1959. The first Mayor Daley had gone to Washington that year to complain that the federal dollar limit allotted for each unit of public housing was prohibitively low, allowing only for the construction of densely packed towers. Daley explained to the senators his hope “to make it not only high-risers but also walk-up and rowhouses.” What the first Mayor Daley may have desired above all else was a bigger share of the federal kitty. But his son sees in the Senate hearing proof that his father has been remembered mistakenly as the creator of Chicago’s public housing system. “‘This is not going to go well,’ as my father explained,” the younger Daley clarified. “Of course, the federal government, always in their wisdom, goes ahead with it.”
It’s true that Richard J. Daley took office after the city council voted to place new de
velopments in existing black neighborhoods, after Elizabeth Wood was fired from the CHA, and after 15,000 of Chicago’s 43,000 units of public housing were already built or under construction. At the ceremonial groundbreaking for the Cabrini Extension towers, on April 23, 1955, Mayor Daley dug up several piles of dirt with a silver-painted shovel as photographers snapped his picture. A crowd of a thousand onlookers broke through police lines in an attempt to shake his hand. It was one of Daley’s first official acts as mayor, as he’d been sworn in only the previous day.
Born in 1902, Daley grew up in a bungalow in the South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport, a mostly Irish community that included the Union Stockyards, which put forty thousand people to work dismembering and packaging most of the nation’s meat. In the nineteenth century the area had actually been called Hardscrabble, and the Irish immigrants who filled it took jobs digging the nearby Illinois and Michigan Canals. Daley, as a teenager, was president of the Hamburg Athletic Club, a group of local toughs, boys from the same parish and operating out of the neighborhood ward office. Daley’s “youth organization” was similar to other groups of teen boys found in many impoverished ethnic or migrant communities; they fought as sport, defended their blocks, and usually aged out of street violence as they took on new roles available to them. In Bridgeport, depending on one’s abilities, that meant a job either on the “disassembly” lines of the stockyards, in municipal work, or in politics. Daley was a short, pugnacious man whose resting face was a tight-lipped scowl; he possessed neither an abundance of charisma nor eloquence, and his rise in the Cook County Democratic organization was not meteoric. He held a series of positions within the rigid hierarchy of the party, showing fealty to superiors but always lobbying to move up the ranks. He worked in the county treasurer’s office and as a state representative, a state senator, the state director of revenue, and as county clerk. An intensely private man robed in tailored suits, he proved hardworking and tough and honest. In 1953, he was named chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, second in command behind only Mayor Kennelly. Kennelly, summed up by the journalist A. J. Liebling as “a bit player impersonating a benevolent mayor,” had failed to quell racial unrest in several transitioning neighborhoods and made the greater error of cutting back on patronage positions in favor of nonpolitical civil servants. In the next election, the party put Daley’s name, not Kennelly’s, on the ballot.
The city’s famed Democratic machine, which controlled Chicago politics for fifty years, was the invention of Anton Cermak, who took over as mayor in 1931. Cermak would go on to operate it for only a brief time. Two years into his mayoralty, while in Miami, he was greeting president-elect Franklin Roosevelt when an Italian immigrant, inflamed by a general disdain for the rich, fired several shots at FDR. The assassin missed his target but managed to strike five bystanders, including Cermak, who later died from his wounds. “I’m glad it was me instead of you,” Cermak supposedly uttered to Roosevelt on the way to the hospital, the words later inscribed on his tomb in the Bohemian National Cemetery, on Chicago’s North Side. Chicago under the machine was often called “the city that works.” But output and efficiency are at best by-products of machine politics, which is fundamentally a maker of self-perpetuation. A ward boss doles out patronage jobs, and the secretaries, park attendants, and sanitation workers who owe their livelihoods to him raise money for the party, and come election time they get out the vote for the entire slate of machine candidates; the ward, in turn, is rewarded with city services, investment, and additional jobs to dispense, while the party remains in control of the purse strings.
Once in office, Daley wasted no time demonstrating how he would consolidate power over his next twenty-one years as mayor. At his inaugural he announced that he was relieving city council members of their “administrative and technical duties.” Constituents had previously gone to their aldermen for everything from requesting a building permit to reporting a road in need of repaving. No longer. Now they would travel downtown, to city hall, for a brief audience with the mayor in his fifth-floor office. Everyone in the city needed to know that they were indebted specifically to the “Man on Five.” “There can be no organizations within the Organization,” Daley famously pronounced. In his first two years as mayor, Daley increased the number of patronage jobs by 75 percent, and the number of exams administered for civil servants was cut by more than half. He oversaw a top-down system of leveraged loyalty and reciprocal favors. Daley believed in its virtue without apology. Once, when urging President Lyndon Johnson to appoint one of his Chicago guys as a US attorney, Daley summed up his case by saying, “But more than that, Mr. President, let me say with great honor and pride, he’s a precinct captain.”
Like other industrial cities along the Great Lakes, Chicago was swooning by the time Daley took office. “A jukebox running down in a deserted bar,” Nelson Algren wrote of Chicago in the fifties. The population fell fast from its 1950 peak of 3.6 million. Businesses abandoned the city at about the same rate—Chicago lost more than fifty thousand manufacturing jobs in the seven years before Daley’s first term. Daley’s plan to “save” the city focused primarily on the central business district and, under his administration, the city would build hundreds of new office towers, including the Prudential Building, McCormick Place, the Civic Center, and the Sears Tower. He presided over the creation of a revised zoning code that freed up where developers could build luxury residential high-rises. And even as people departed for the suburbs, Daley made it easier for them to travel back to the flagging city for business, commerce, and pleasure by constructing highways, the largest underground downtown parking system in the country, with eight thousand spaces, and underground walkways leading directly to office buildings and department stores. You could return to the changing inner city without ever having to be exposed to it.
Daley might have argued for low-rise public housing before the Senate, but if “high-risers” were what was available, high-risers were what he would build. Millions of federal dollars were at stake, representing thousands of jobs and many big union contracts. As Chicago made upgrades to its centrally located communities, public housing also became a tool wielded to assist the developers involved in the rebuilding. Those displaced by government-funded urban renewal had to be relocated somewhere; they were moved into the new high-rise projects. Almost all these families were African American—not for nothing was urban renewal referred to ruefully as “Negro removal.” Whites still made up 13 percent of the families in CHA properties, but they lived almost exclusively in low-rise developments and senior buildings. Daley had inherited a faulty public housing system, but he was responsible for doubling its size. With 43,000 units, Chicago became home to the second-largest stock of public housing in the nation, well behind New York, with 180,000 units (and technically behind Puerto Rico, too).
Most of the new public housing went up on the South Side, with densities greatly exceeding what the CHA had previously allowed. The Robert Taylor Homes, named almost ironically in honor of the agency’s African American chairman who’d pushed for integration, replaced a big chunk of the Federal Street Slum and became the largest public housing complex in the world. Its twenty-eight nearly identical sixteen-story towers stretched in groups of three along a narrow ninety-five-acre band. The buildings would extend the State Street Corridor of public housing from the Hilliard Homes, just south of the Loop, through the Harold Ickes Homes, Dearborn Homes, Stateway Gardens, and on to Robert Taylor. It was a largely uninterrupted four-mile wall of public housing, cut off from points west by the newly constructed fourteen-lane Dan Ryan Expressway.
And in 1962, the city completed the William Green Homes, the last portion of what came to be known as Cabrini-Green. The development was named for a longtime leader of the American Federation of Labor, who took over the union from Samuel Gompers. (The AFL had been found guilty of illegally excluding blacks from the unions building the Cabrini rowhouses.) The Green Homes consisted of 1,096 apartments, in eight
exposed concrete towers of fifteen and sixteen stories spaced within a tidy triangle of land formed by Division Street and the point formed to the north by the intersection of two diagonal avenues—Clybourn and Ogden. The buildings’ concrete frames and precast concrete sectionals were of the same sandy beige color, and the towers looked like giant computer punch cards. They came to be known as the “Whites,” in contrast to the “Reds” across Division Street to the south. Including the rowhouses and its twenty-three high-rises, Cabrini-Green now consisted of 3,600 units of public housing, all of it on a total of just seventy acres of land.
DOLORES WILSON
WHEN HUBERT WILSON was assigned the graveyard janitorial shift for the red Cabrini Extension high-rises, Dolores decided she’d take a job during the day. She worked on and off at the Spiegel catalog company, sending out letters to people who hadn’t paid their bills. She had a position as a receptionist for a doctor, as a clerk at a cleaner’s, and for a while at the Department of Veterans Affairs employment center. Just as her mother had done on the South Side, Dolores started going door-to-door for the local precinct captain, traveling up and down her high-rise, talking to every tenant, telling them when to vote and whom to vote for. When the ward organization held its big raffle, she sold tickets, coming out of pocket for any of the ones she couldn’t foist on others. It was no small expense. “But that’s the way it is,” Dolores would say. “It isn’t what you know; it’s who you know.” She was right. The precinct captain came to rely on Dolores, and when a bundle of patronage jobs was being divvied up, he raised her name. In 1966, she started at the city’s Department of Water Management, just a few blocks east in the Chicago Avenue Pumping Station, across Michigan Avenue from the old Chicago Water Tower. She was the only black person there, in an office that handled paychecks for the entire department.
