by Ben Austen
CHA properties required constant upkeep—tuck-pointing and weatherproofing, repairs to roofs and masonry, to windowsills, electrical systems, plumbing, heating, and appliances. With less money coming in, the CHA cut back on maintenance. To save money at Cabrini-Green and other developments, the landscaped perimeters were paved over. “Everything became blacktop,” Dolores Wilson said. “No flowers. No trees. No nothing.” After 1968, the ramps were also fenced in from floor to ceiling at almost all the high-rise developments. A precaution to protect both residents from falls and people below from falling objects, it also made tenants appear as if they were caged inside their buildings. With the concrete boundaries and the metal fencing, the high-rise public housing complexes took on the look of a prison.
The CHA’s mismanagement of its properties was also monumental. No other housing authority in the nation spent more on labor costs, and no city got less for its money. The head of the agency beginning in the sixties was a consummate city operator who regularly traded on his position in government to enrich himself. Charles Swibel was ten when his family emigrated from Poland, in 1937, and he spoke no English. He spent his afternoons in Chicago educating himself in his neighborhood public library, and at fourteen he won a citywide essay contest on the patriotic theme of “What America Means to Me.” He took a job filling mustard packets at a kosher sausage factory, and another with one of the city’s largest slumlords, sweeping the offices but soon graduating to rent collector in the rooming houses along West Madison Street’s “Skid Row.” The owner of these down-market buildings paid Swibel’s way through college and eventually promoted him to president of the company. (The man’s children would later sue Swibel for raiding the family trust fund, with Swibel settling the case out of court.) Mayor Daley appointed him to the CHA board in 1956, and Swibel took over as chairman of the agency in 1963. Under his leadership, the CHA suffered from a bloated staff and fake work assignments, and Swibel, whom the daily press liked to call “Flophouse Charlie,” awarded contracts to cronies. Time and again, he ignored calls for reforms after scathing reports documented his agency’s failings.
Swibel also borrowed money at extremely favorable rates from those doing business with the CHA, using the funds to finance his private development projects. One of them was Marina City, the circular twin towers bordering the Chicago River north of the Loop and a mile from Cabrini-Green. As an appeal to young white professionals nervous about urban living, the buildings were marketed as a protected “city within a city,” with their own theater, bowling alley, restaurants, and boat slips. The corncob high-rises were also key to a burgeoning revitalization of the Near North Side in the mid-sixties that both skipped over and further isolated Cabrini-Green. Chicago’s white population declined by more than 800,000 from 1950 to 1970, and the river district that included Cabrini-Green flipped from 85 percent white in 1940 to 90 percent black thirty years later, forming the only significant African American settlement in the city not on the South or West Sides. Yet even as the housing project seemed to expand to define its immediate surroundings, the city was already taking action to “rescue” the nearby communities from a similar fate. Nearly a hundred acres in this area close to the city center were declared an urban renewal site; three-quarters of the existing housing was razed, and the emptied land readied for development. In 1962, the Chicago real estate baron Arthur Rubloff broke ground on a sprawling middle-income residential complex to the east of Cabrini-Green, in the Old Town neighborhood, using land bought and cleared by the city’s Department of Urban Renewal. The 2,600-unit Carl Sandburg Village included tennis courts, swimming pools, and underground parking. Its nine residential towers were each named for renowned literary figures: Cummings House, Dickinson House, Faulkner House. Many of the new residents were young and white and working in the Loop, and the Puerto Ricans who’d lived on the cleared land were pushed farther north. If it had not been for Sandburg Village, Rubloff claimed, “the whole area would have gone down the drain.”
Cabrini-Green was contained in other ways as well. North Avenue, the boulevard separating the housing project from Lincoln Park, was widened, extending the gulf. On the Lincoln Park side, facades were remade so that entrances opened onto opposite-end courtyards, and roads were turned into cul-de-sacs. In the sixties, a new group called the Lincoln Park Conservation Association, citing the damaging effects of blight on its members’ community, petitioned the city to disconnect Ogden Avenue after its bridge passed north of the white high-rises of Cabrini-Green. Since the 1930s, the slanting thoroughfare, named for Chicago’s first mayor, had offered West Siders a speedy route to the beaches and shops along the lakefront. But Lincoln Park residents now said the wide thoroughfare was an eyesore and harmful to development. In 1967, they convinced the city to close the street to traffic at 1230 N. Burling, the barricades there forming a literal and symbolic divide between Cabrini-Green and the gentrifying areas north of North Avenue. Witch or no witch, Kelvin and his friends could have at their junkyard games beneath the dead-end bridge. But a couple of blocks past their housing project, Ogden Avenue disappeared under newly built parks, townhomes, and a pedestrian mall.
IN APRIL 1968, Kelvin was just tall enough to stand on tiptoe and peer over the windowsill in his seventh-floor apartment. He watched wide eyed as people broke into stores and pushed overflowing shopping carts down the middle of the street. The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, students at the schools around Cabrini-Green rushed out of their classes; teachers locked themselves inside the buildings, waiting for the police to escort them to their cars in dashes of three and four at a time. People who filled the streets pulled over delivery trucks, beating the drivers and cleaning out the vehicles of their goods. Looters tore through the local stores—Jerry’s, Del Farm, Pioneer, the A&P on Clybourn, Greenman’s, Harry’s drugstore, Big Frank’s.
Dolores Wilson watched from her high-rise as well. She saw men raid the cleaner’s and walk out with pants and shirts and jackets that probably belonged to people they knew. One lady left a butcher shop with a whole hog. “Where will she put all that meat?” Dolores asked herself. “When will she eat it all?” There were people with carts full of greens. The Wilsons didn’t have very much to eat at home, and Dolores thought she could use some of those greens. Someone might bring them at least an egg or two, she joked. Kenny was twelve, and he begged his mother to let him go outside to join his friends. “You don’t do what everybody else does,” she scolded him. “You do what I say.” Che Che was older, however, a teenager, and he was on his way to a pool hall when members of the National Guard arrived. He ducked behind a car. “Are you one of them looting?” a cop in riot gear asked him. “No, sir.” But they clubbed him over the head anyway and took him to lockup. When he didn’t show up at home that night, the Wilsons called the jail. They were told no one named Hubert Wilson Jr. was there. But they had a friend who worked at the jail, and he eventually found Che Che’s paperwork. Their oldest son walked out with a bandage wrapped like a turban around his head.
Several blocks in any direction from Cabrini-Green, business went on as usual, and the riots were mostly experienced as a news event on TV. But at Cabrini-Green, the cracks of rifles were heard for days. Shops on North, Larrabee, Oak, and Wells were ransacked. Some residents were too fearful to venture outside, and local agencies brought them food and other essentials. Crowds continued to mill about the streets, primed to vent their frustrations. Shouts went up that they should march over to Sandburg Village. The new private housing development seemed to represent everything that Cabrini-Green was not—and also what Cabrini might become, since Sandburg’s developer, Arthur Rubloff, said publicly that he could convert the Cabrini towers into condos and make a fortune. But Cabrini residents didn’t make it over to Sandburg Village. They heard about Mayor Daley’s orders to “shoot to kill.” And National Guardsmen in tanks positioned themselves on Wells Street, the eastern boundary between Cabrini-Green and the Gold Coast beyond; police sealed off th
e still-existing westward portion of the Ogden Avenue Bridge. Those at Cabrini were hemmed in on all sides.
On the West Side, in predominantly black neighborhoods, people burned stores, as well as the apartments above them. More than two hundred properties were destroyed. By comparison, the physical damage around Cabrini-Green seemed manageable. Life went on there, if uneasily. Some of the longtime shop owners chose not to restock their looted establishments. Germans, Italians, and Jews who’d already witnessed a couple of the demographic transformations on the Near North Side decided that they no longer belonged. But most of the stores reopened. Cabrini residents boycotted a few of them for price gouging. The Black Panthers set up a free breakfast program in the basement of one of the Catholic churches left empty by the long-gone Italians. Students from Waller and Cooley went ahead with plays, choruses, and formals. Retirees met for luncheons at the Lower North Center, and children enjoyed an Easter egg hunt with games and songs in the nearby 135-acre Lincoln Park. “The curfew had taken its toll,” the Defender reported of the Easter event, “and the youngsters were more than pleased to get into the routine of evening Recreation.”
KELVIN CANNON
NOT TOO LONG after the riots, Kelvin Cannon’s parents split up. He would blame his mother for pushing the quarrels nearly to the point of violence. But it was his father who left for the South Side, where he soon remarried and started a second family. Kelvin’s aunt, who lived in another white Cabrini-Green high-rise, 714 W. Division, offered to help her sister with the children. When Kelvin was seven, in 1971, the family moved two buildings down, and his mother went on welfare.
Kelvin instantly made two best friends in his new building. He practically lived in Reginald and William Blackmon’s apartment, and they in his. They ate at one another’s kitchen tables, slept side by side in crowded bedrooms, and each of their mothers put Band-Aids or spankings on any of them as if they were her own. Like Kelvin, almost all the other children in 714 W. Division had only a mother at home; Reggie and William’s older brother, Richard, once counted just five grown men living in the entire sixteen-story, 134-unit tower—which was one of the reasons the boys traded stories about their gym teacher. After the move, Kelvin would no longer attend Jenner; children in his new high-rise crossed the blacktop outside their building and walked to Friedrich von Schiller. The PE teacher there, Kelvin was told in advance, was a professional athlete and would teach you how to play basketball and baseball just like him. His name was Mr. White, and he would buy you sneakers. He would unbuckle his belt in the middle of class and whip your behind. He would take you horseback riding, swimming, and canoeing.
Jesse White really did these things. He coached every sport at the nearby YMCA, and he led the largest Boy Scout troop in the nation out of Cabrini-Green, with over three hundred members. Since 1959, he’d operated the Jesse White Tumblers, a high-flying gymnastics program. Cabrini children did leaping somersaults and acrobatic dives over rows of their fellow Tumblers at everything from Chicago Bulls games to state fairs and broadcasts of Bozo’s Circus. White once transformed the blacktop around Kelvin’s building into a roller rink. Another time, he and a white retired naval officer from Sandburg Village named Joe Owen created the Cabrini-Green Community Sandlot Tennis Club; they painted the lines for the courts right onto the concrete, dug holes, planted posts, and set up the nets. They held contests to see which kids could clear the courts of the most pieces of glass—one winner bagged eight thousand shards. Some children told Kelvin that they spent close to 365 days a year with Mr. White, seeing him more than they did their own families.
The first time Kelvin entered Schiller, he expected to see a giant of a man, John Henry in gym shorts. He imagined that the ground would rumble beneath the PE teacher wherever he stepped. But although an ordinary five foot eight, Jesse White cut an imposing figure, with a neck like a stone column and barrels for arms. It was also the way he stood in front of the PE class, his shirt and pants pressed, his back straight, how he instructed the students to assume a military position as they recited the Pledge of Allegiance—chins up, heels touching, and feet pointing out at 45 degrees. He pronounced his words loudly and powerfully but without displeasure, repeating a collection of tough-love maxims. “Winning is for you, losing is for someone else.” “Be a gentleman first, we’ll argue about the rest later.” He had a dozen of these sayings that seemed from a different place and time, more Knute Rockne, All American than Cabrini-Green. “I want you to be leafless, smokeless—the only time you should use pharmaceuticals is if you’re wearing a lab coat.” He talked to his students about geography and the environment. He taught his Tumblers how to speak to donors, never to beg for anything. He aimed to keep them too busy to get mixed up in trouble, but he’d also say he was preparing them in case they made it out of the projects. Many of the boys under his charge thought, I want to be just like him.
Jesse White was born in 1934, in Alton, Illinois, a city along the Mississippi River, in the southern part of the state. At seven, he moved with his family into a cold-water flat on Division Street, on the very spot where the William Green Homes would be built. An inveterate extrovert, White reveled in the diversity of the Near North Side of his youth. He’d sample Greek and Persian cooking; he’d thrill Italian or Hungarian shop owners by speaking a few sentences in their native tongue. His father worked a dozen odd jobs as he struggled to find something steady, and the family subsisted on public aid for several years. White learned firsthand that welfare was not only a necessity but also a woefully insufficient one, incapable of adequately feeding and clothing a family. But he believed that one could make the choice to transcend poverty. It might require the generosity of others, but your own rigor and rectitude were essential. As a teen, he went door-to-door in the tenements delivering coal, ice, and wood. He could also jump three feet when he shot a basketball at Waller High, and he was the first person in his family to go to college, using a basketball scholarship to attend Alabama State University, a historically black school in Montgomery. In 1955, he’d say, he introduced the jump shot to the heart of Dixie. He was a student during the Montgomery bus boycott; the civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy pledged him into the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity; Martin Luther King Jr. was the preacher at his church. White wouldn’t sit in the back of a bus, but neither did he join the protests. And he never lost faith in the institutions of the country or in his own personal ability to overcome.
White was far from the only person at Cabrini-Green who hustled and scraped and labored to keep the children there productively busy. Elax Taylor operated the 911 Teen Club out of the basement of the 911 N. Hudson high-rise. Marion Stamps found money from the federal Model Cities and other War on Poverty programs to open a health clinic, a youth center, and an alternative school with an Afrocentric curriculum. Al Carter started a youth foundation, a Little League team, and the Cabrini-Green Olympics. Hubert Wilson had the Corsairs. And numerous other residents volunteered their time, coaching and mentoring, or worked low-paying jobs in nonprofit day care and after-school programs. But Jesse White had a unique ability to bridge the divide between the children in the towers and the power brokers close by. He was drafted into the army after college, in 1957, serving in the 101st Airborne Division. He played in the Chicago Cubs farm system for eight summers, each fall returning to Chicago to run youth programs for the park district at Cabrini. He landed the park district job the same way all city jobs were allocated back then—through the Democratic Party’s regular political machine. White’s parents had brought voters out to the polls each election, and his precinct captain in the ward organization recommended him. White became close with the ward committeeman, George Dunne, a lifetime Near North Sider who served in the Illinois House of Representatives and went on to become president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, the second-most powerful position in the city behind the mayor. White believed in the bonds of loyalty that held together the machine’s patronage system—you were elevated so that you could elev
ate others. Through the party, he found businessmen who were willing to help him buy vans for transporting his tumbling team and winter coats and shoes for other children at Cabrini-Green.
Kelvin was never a Jesse White Tumbler. But he was a Cub Scout and Boy Scout under Mr. White. As one of Mr. White’s Patrol Boys, he put on a uniform to direct other children to and from school. And when Kelvin was eight, he was one of fifty Schiller students White took skiing; none of them had ever been on a slope or worn skis, and it was the most exciting day so far in Kelvin’s life. “He was that father figure who wasn’t at home for a lot of us,” Kelvin would say. “He took us places like a normal father might take us. He spent time with us like we were his kids.”
