by Ben Austen
Many nights she’d hustle back to Cabrini-Green from the water department, cook dinner for the children, help them with homework, and then rush out again for a meeting at Holy Family or Jenner Elementary or the Lower North Center. In addition to his janitorial work, Hubert also coached a basketball and a baseball team that their sons joined. When they lived on the South Side, Hubert had been in the National Guard, and at Cabrini-Green he started a drum and bugle corps that he named the Corsairs. Three other janitors helped him; two were named Brown, and for their different complexions Dolores called them “Red Brown” and “Black Brown,” though not to their faces. The men went to Montgomery Ward to get the fabric to make the Corsairs’ pirate uniforms. Neither the Wilson children nor many of the other boys and girls in the Corsairs could read music, but they learned the beat and picked up the songs easily enough. The boys who didn’t play instruments turned mock rifles in lockstep, and the girls twirled batons and flags as majorettes. They practiced in the field outside 1117 N. Cleveland and the other surrounding towers, people looking down on them from a hundred different ramps or watching from in front of the buildings. Soon the Cabrini-Green Corsairs were traveling to suburbs outside Chicago, marching in parades for Saint Patrick’s Day and Memorial Day, and winning trophies at competitions.
Occasionally, amid their work jobs and their volunteer jobs and all that parenting entailed, Dolores and Hubert found time to go out together. Sometimes they just sat outside in the park beside the high-rises, laughing and talking. It was beautiful out there, Dolores would say, “Green grass everywhere, flowers, no blacktop or broken glass.” Hubert loved jazz, and he’d invite people over to the apartment to listen to records. But the two of them also went out with the other janitors and their wives. South of them, behind Montgomery Ward, was a ghost town of warehouses come night. But there were some clubs on Chicago Avenue that they frequented. Dolores favored the Chicago Lounge. It wasn’t fancy, but the people there treated them like regulars, remembering their names and what they drank. The DJ spun records Dolores wanted to hear. If someone asked her to dance, she’d have to get Hubert’s permission. “He was jealous, jealous, jealous,” she would say. “That man wouldn’t believe a black cow gave white milk.” She didn’t give him anything to worry about; she was ever faithful. But if they were apart for ten minutes, he’d ask where she’d been and with whom. They’d argue some nights over these petty exchanges, though come morning they never parted without an apology, trading kisses and saying, “I love you.” Dolores had been a teenager when they married, and the two of them still walked the land at Cabrini-Green holding hands.
At the Chicago Lounge, Hubert would look over the guy who wanted a dance, sizing him up, and say, “Yeah, go on, baby.” It wasn’t close dancing. It was jitterbugging, the bop, the chicken. “But heaven forbid that guy asked me for a second dance,” Dolores remembered.
3
Catch-as-Catch-Can
KELVIN CANNON
ON THE WESTERN edge of Cabrini-Green, in the industrial wilds between the river and the high-rises, somewhere within the dumping grounds beneath an elevated roadway, an old witch was said to make her home. Kelvin Cannon had heard the story a thousand times. His mother told it to him at bedtime. His relatives and friends’ mothers repeated it. His teachers cited it as a warning. The witch roamed the hills under the Ogden Avenue Bridge, just beyond the Whites of the William Green Homes. Any little boy or girl caught outside after dark, the witch would snatch up. Kelvin had even seen a sketch of her pinned to the bulletin board at the YMCA, like a wanted poster. A gypsy lady, with colorless skin, long, matted hair, and flowing robes of rags.
Kelvin’s family was living in 534 W. Division, one of the new white high-rises, when he was born in 1963. His parents had moved there from the West Side, and before that from a river town in Mississippi. Kelvin had convulsions as an infant, and from a young age he believed himself in possession of uncommon powers of perception. He figured the tale of the witch had to be far-fetched. The more he considered it, the more he understood that adults probably put the story out there to keep children like him out of harm’s way. The barrens under the Ogden overpass were nowhere safe. You’d find broken-down cars there, machine parts, cracked bits of road, and makeshift tents of cardboard and wood in which vagrants sometimes slept. His mother and teachers could just as well have said a big brown bear lived down there. Yet Kelvin had friends who swore they’d seen the witch. From the upper floors of their high-rises, these children pointed out their windows at the bridge directly below—Right there! That moving shadow, that’s her! One boy starting his paper route in the predawn gloom was startled when a figure zipped past him. He watched, unable to move, as the white blur slipped through a gap in the fence and disappeared into the hollow below the bridge. Then the boy ran.
Kelvin stayed clear of the bridge after sunset. It was a precaution. He wouldn’t even walk above it after dark. But in daylight, that was another story. The Ogden Bridge became his playground. The roadway slashed diagonally across the city’s right-angled streets, and at Cabrini it formed into an overpass and veered sharply, nearly brushing against the back of the 1230 N. Burling high-rise. Cars regularly took the curve too fast, and on rainy nights Kelvin could hear from the heights of his apartment the scream of tires followed by the crash. He was sure people died. The next morning, he and other boys would pick through whatever wreckage was left behind. They sometimes played jacks on the bridge’s deck. They scampered up and down the stairs leading under it, their dares prompting jumps from ever-higher perches. By the piers below, they gathered up old mattresses and torn-out car seats and flipped off them. He and his friends climbed a mountain of coal. There was a steep hill—Hickory Hill, they called it. The boys took turns riding down it in shopping carts, unable to slow themselves or stop, even as they rolled into traffic. It was thrilling. Sometimes they’d break open the shipping containers stored under the bridge. You could turn them into a clubhouse. A boy who bought a dog training manual kept puppies there. They made slingshots and hunted the pigeons nesting in the rafters. An old woman in apartment 303 of Kelvin’s building paid twenty-five cents a bird. Once when a group of them were throwing rocks at the windows of the Old King Coal Company, a police car pulled up alongside them. The cops took hoses from the trunk of their cruiser and wore out their arms beating the boys.
In Kelvin’s building the boys hung out together in a great pack, two or three dozen of them. They were children Kelvin’s age along with their brothers and cousins. “Every day was another adventure at Cabrini-Green,” Kelvin would say. They picked sides for games of football. Or they played sixteen-inch softball or baseball, and they took on the teams of boys from the surrounding high-rises. When they weren’t venturing under the bridge, the boys sometimes set out for a game of catch-as-catch-can. They’d start in the morning, each of them darting off in a different direction and trying not to get tagged. They’d sprint through the canyons between the white high-rises, dash up Division, and race across the Ogden Avenue Bridge, over the river and a maze of rail lines and squat factories. They kept on running, over other bridges, through the surrounding parks, along the banks of the river, past the crowds on Chicago Avenue and the shops on Wells Street and back to Cabrini-Green. Ogden Avenue provided a straight shot to the West Side, to the massive Cook County Hospital and into the neighborhoods where Kelvin and many of the other boys had family. But the game’s only rules were they couldn’t leave the Near North Side. Games sometimes lasted an entire day, the boys’ lungs burning, their legs wobbly after five or ten miles. When one of them was caught, the other guys jumped on him a bit, roughing him up with punches and kicks. Kelvin liked that about the game—it toughened them. He felt you needed that. “Growing up in Cabrini, you had to have heart,” he’d say. There were hundreds of other rowdy thrill seekers roving about, the kids from each building forming their own packs. Your mom might sew pockets into your underwear so older boys didn’t take your money on the way to the store.
But Kelvin learned that you at least had to act like you weren’t afraid. There were kids who wouldn’t trade blows, who became targets, who couldn’t fight their way to acceptance. Those kids stayed inside. They missed out on the fun, Kelvin said. “Those who weren’t scared lived just about a normal life.”
Kelvin had heart. Few things scared him. But on his first day of school, at Jenner, he could not stop crying. The elementary school was across Division Street, in the basin below several of the red Cabrini high-rises. Each morning, children spilled out of the nearby towers like coins from a slot machine, all those kids somehow fitting into Jenner, though just barely. It was the most crowded school in Chicago, with more than 2,500 students in a turn-of-the-century building meant to serve half that number. When his teacher, Ms. Redman, tried to console him, Kelvin could tell she was a nice woman. He was able to see people’s character like that. She assured him that everything would be fine. But Ms. Redman intimidated him as well. Although Kelvin had sprinted past countless white people on the streets of the Near North Side, he’d never before exchanged two consecutive sentences with one.
IN 1966, MARTIN Luther King Jr. moved into a West Side tenement, as part of his Chicago Freedom Movement. For King, it was an ambitious effort to expand the fight for civil rights from voting rights in the South to fair and open housing in northern cities. The extent and ferocity of Chicago’s segregation made the city a fitting target. After he was stoned by angry residents during a march through all-white Marquette Park, on the city’s Southwest Side, King said, “The people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” The city’s large public housing complexes were the most prominent landmarks of its segregation. By the late sixties, what King called “the Chicago Housing Authority’s cement reservations” were home to some 143,000 people, almost all of them black. When King came to Cabrini-Green, speaking at the neighborhood’s Wayman AME Church, he showed up in support of residents who wanted changes at the overcrowded and underfunded Jenner. Parents demanded that the school be equipped with science and foreign-language labs, with an adequate library and the remedial tutoring that many of the students required. They insisted that the white principal be fired for her racial bias. A newspaper story about the demonstrations included a photograph of little Cheryl Wilson, Dolores and Hubert’s youngest daughter, her pigtails bouncing as she marched with others, chanting that the principal must go.
Three years earlier, when 200,000 black students in Chicago boycotted their segregated and inferior public schools as part of a coordinated “Freedom Day” protest, Mayor Daley responded by saying that in Chicago “there are no ghettoes.” But in the city’s black neighborhoods, students were being taught in “Willis Wagons,” mobile homes named for the school superintendent. The Willis Wagons were parked outside aging buildings, their classrooms filled beyond capacity, while schools in nearby white areas were underenrolled. King returned to Cabrini-Green again in 1966, when Jenner parents were in the third day of a planned five-day walkout of the school. Forty truant officers from the city had flooded the housing development that morning, going door-to-door in the rowhouses and high-rises, warning tenants that they could face criminal charges if they continued to keep their children at home. A rally was supposed to be held in Dolores’s high-rise, but the large numbers forced it into Saint Matthew’s, on Oak Street. “Should you in any way be persecuted or prosecuted for attempting to seek the best education possible for your children,” King said from the pulpit, “I can assure you that thousands of parents from all over the city will come to your aid and together we will join you in jail if necessary.” Although the public school superintendent who replaced Willis blamed the protests on outside agitators and a handful of parent provocateurs, the organizing compelled him to transfer Jenner’s principal at the end of the school year.
The protests weren’t always so peaceful. A few months later, at Waller, one of the neighborhood high schools, hundreds of black students took to the streets, believing that a group of white teens had thrown a black classmate onto the El tracks. The integrated school, located a mile north in tonier Lincoln Park, had recently seen hundreds of white students transfer out. Violence spread to nearby Cooley High, a predominantly black vocational school that had taken over the building vacated by Washburne Trade. Students there exchanged gunfire with police, smashing the windows of Paul Bunyan’s restaurant, Barbara’s Bookstore, and other local shops in the nearby Old Town neighborhood. They filled bottles with lighter fluid, set them on fire, and tossed the Molotov cocktails at passing cars. Waller students rallied again soon after, as they demanded that their school offer a class in “Negro history” and hire a black instructor to teach it. Police diverted traffic away from Cabrini-Green for two hours while teenagers threw rocks and bottles to the chant of, “Let’s break up Old Town!”
The CHA had celebrated its first developments in the forties and fifties as “Children’s Cities,” havens for the most vulnerable and blameless of the city’s inhabitants. “Chicago,” the agency announced, “must plan for those other children who, through the benefits of public housing, can also become the good citizens of tomorrow.” The high-rises were designed to accommodate large families: Cabrini-Green’s towers included numerous four- and five-bedroom apartments. In just about any neighborhood in America, whether the old Little Hell or Bronzeville on the South Side or the “Bungalow Belt” extending from the northwest corner of Chicago all the way around to the southeast, the population averaged roughly one child for every two adults. Yet in Chicago’s family public housing, the ratio skewed to more than two children for every one adult. Of the Robert Taylor Homes’ 27,000 residents, nearly 21,000 were minors. In the late sixties, a property manager at Cabrini-Green reported that 20,000 people lived in the complex’s 3,600 apartments, 14,000 of them under the age of seventeen.
For the young Kelvin Cannon, that sort of overpopulated children’s city provided endless entertainment. “Just to keep ourselves occupied, we strayed into mischief,” Kelvin would say. “We had to make up our own fun.” A mother might take one child with her to run an errand, leaving the rest unsupervised. They broke into the laundry and storage rooms. They gathered old bedrails or a stripped stove and tossed parts down the stairwells or off the ramps. They leaped up to shatter light bulbs. They had a game in which they pried open the elevators from inside the cabin, propping them with a stick. In the instant that the elevator passed each floor, you could jump on or off. Or you could surf on top of the cabin as it soared the height of the towers. The toll of this mischief was high. Much of the playground equipment around them broke from overuse. The elevators couldn’t handle the games, and the CHA was unable to keep pace with needed repairs. The agency said it had to replace eighteen thousand light bulbs every single month across its developments, and it found itself spending a huge portion of its operating budget on elevator maintenance alone. Residents too often were left to climb the stairs in the dark. At Cabrini-Green, the maintenance teams racked up a list of 1,200 unfilled work orders. Leaks, cracked walls, and broken doors went unfixed. The mischief had greater costs as well. Robert Payne was a ten-year-old in one of the red Cabrini high-rises. He leaped from a beam inside his elevator shaft and landed with two feet solidly on the roof of a rising car. His eight-year-old brother, David, jumping next to him, fell short and was crushed between the elevator and the shaft.
President Johnson’s War on Poverty identified these “cement reservations” as a key battleground, funding programs in public housing projects with a mission of “maximum feasible participation.” That meant Cabrini residents ran initiatives out of the Lower North Center paid for by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity—neighborhood councils, Job Corps, Model Cities, Neighborhood Youth Corps. Tenants took pride in their neighborhood and were concerned about the well-being of the families around them. But the Cabrini-Green that Kelvin Cannon was growing up in was different in fundamental ways from the one Dolores and Hubert had found so uplifting little more th
an a decade before. When the Wilsons moved to their high-rise, public housing was intended to pay for itself through rent collection. By the time the white William Green towers were built in the sixties, however, the demand for housing in Chicago had diminished. Hundreds of thousands of white residents had already left the city for the suburbs, and the rush of black families arriving from the South had subsided. To fill its 168 high-rises, the CHA accepted tenants with no screening required, some directly off the welfare rolls. Federal reforms to public assistance in the late sixties meant to help the neediest required that local authorities house tenants in order of application, prohibiting the ability to vet for those with jobs. The number of Cabrini-Green households on public aid rose steadily during the sixties to more than half the total population. By the end of the decade, 60 percent of the families with children had only one parent at home. Women on welfare were in many ways discouraged from marrying or officially sharing a residence with the father of their children, since the presence of a man could leave them ineligible for benefits. The median income of CHA residents dropped from 64 percent of the citywide average in 1950 to just 37 percent in 1970.
Public housing residents in Chicago paid different amounts in rent depending on their incomes. In 1960, rent for a three-bedroom started at $41 a month and went up $1 for every $55 more a tenant earned annually, up to a maximum rent of $110. As the residents as a whole became poorer, the amount the CHA received from rents plummeted. Federal funding, rather than making up the difference, was scaled back as well. Across the country, housing agencies ran huge deficits. For several years starting in the early sixties, the CHA switched to fixed rents—$80 for a three-bedroom, or $140 for the same unit if a family earned above a certain threshold. It was simpler, and did away with tenants hiding income, but it was harder on the poorest families on welfare. Edward Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican and the first African American ever to be popularly elected to the US Senate, sponsored a bill that he hoped would protect those in public housing from shouldering the burden as housing authorities scrambled to get out of the red. The 1969 Brooke Amendment prorated rents at no more than 25 percent of a household’s income (eventually upped to 30 percent). The law, while well meaning, meant a big jump in what working families who’d been paying a fixed amount each month now owed. Already putting up with broken elevators and inferior schools, this stabilizing force now had another reason to abandon public housing, and their departure left behind an ever-greater share of residents who were on public aid and paid very little in rent. “These rental increases are intolerable. Families with jobs are being forced to move out,” the president of the Cabrini-Green tenant council wrote in a letter sent to city, state, and federal officials. “The small savings to the U.S. Treasury must be balanced against the devastating impact on the lives of many public housing residents, especially when other benefits for the poor are being cut.”
