by Ben Austen
Thus Cabrini-Green after the cop killings became both a real place with an array of actual problems and an abstraction. In short order Cabrini-Green was the setting for the Norman Lear prime-time sitcom Good Times, which told the story of a family of five struggling nobly in their two-bedroom, one-bathroom public housing apartment. James Evans, the family patriarch, orders his youngest son to his room after he’s suspended from middle school for calling George Washington a slaveholding racist. “But, Daddy, this is my room. I’m the little fellow who sleeps on the couch.” Good Times was one of the most-watched programs on television, behind All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man, and The Jeffersons—all of them playing to the country’s fixation on issues of race and class and upheaval in inner cities. Eric Monte, one of the creators of Good Times, grew up in the Cabrini rowhouses, and the movie he wrote based on his teenage years there, Cooley High, was marketed as the black American Graffiti. For the 1970s urban crime novel The Horror of Cabrini-Green, the cover copy promised, “Inside Chicago’s worst public housing project and a young man’s vicious struggle to survive.” Each of these representations of Cabrini-Green added to the myth and also came to shape the reality there. During one brutal stretch of pages in The Horror of Cabrini-Green, an eight-year-old is raped, the police shoot a child who stole a bag of potato chips, and the sixteen-year-old narrator, Bosco, and other members of his gang break into a neighborhood church and hang the priest. “‘Damn, it sho is a violent day, ain’t it?’” one of Bosco’s friends observes nonchalantly, suggesting they might head over to another high-rise to check out the pummeling of a boy they know. “Shorty and I agreed that it was definitely a violent day,” Bosco relates. “We went over to watch Jessie get his ass whipped.”
In a public housing newsletter, a media-relations official at the CHA addressed the outsize place Cabrini-Green came to hold in the civic imagination: “‘Cabrini-Green’ now stood for something more than a public housing development in Chicago named for a Catholic saint and a labor leader: it also spelled ‘fear’ in the minds of the citizens of the city and the residents of ‘the project.’” Defining Cabrini-Green as the big civic problem also meant it couldn’t be ignored; it needed to be dealt with, solved. “As though by focusing on this one community and isolating it,” the CHA official said of the sudden obsession with all things Cabrini, “they could exorcise the violence, the crime, the poverty, and the racial fears of the city.”
CABRINI-GREEN’S NEWFOUND NOTORIETY brought Jesse Jackson out to the housing project. In 1970, Jackson was running the Chicago chapter of Operation Breadbasket, the branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference focused on improving economic conditions in African American communities. At a news conference in front of the high-rises, he praised Severin and Rizzato while evocatively calling Cabrini-Green “the Soul Coast on the Gold Coast.” He also said he was acting as spokesperson for a new group named the People’s Organization of Cabrini-Green. The People’s Organization pointed out that Cabrini-Green had as many inhabitants as most suburban villages or towns, yet it lacked almost all of their services and amenities. They demanded better street lighting. They wanted childcare facilities, a medically staffed emergency room, and three Olympic-size swimming pools—an average of one for every 5,700 people there. The organization also insisted that a black-owned company be hired to operate security at the housing project. “Black men are good enough to work as military police in Vietnam,” Jackson proclaimed. “Why can’t they be policemen right here in the Chicago police force?” Jackson sent a telegram to President Nixon, requesting federal disaster relief for Cabrini-Green. While the housing development had not “suffered either a natural or man-made catastrophe in the normal sense,” Jackson wrote to Nixon, “the area must be considered a disaster area due to the potentially riotous conditions accompanying the resultant tension.”
Nixon responded to Jackson’s request, dispatching George Romney, his secretary of Housing and Urban Development, to Cabrini-Green. Romney, the former Michigan governor, had lost the Republican primary to Nixon two years earlier, going from presidential front-runner to also-ran in a few blundering weeks. A moderate Republican compared with Nixon, he’d reached on his own the same conclusion as the federal commissions that had studied the causes of recent inner-city unrest: segregation was destroying America. In his new cabinet position, he planned to use public housing to move African Americans out of urban ghettoes and into thriving suburbs. In Chicago, in 1969, a federal judge had ordered the CHA to do exactly that, ruling that the placement of the city’s public housing developments in predominantly black neighborhoods fostered segregation and was in direct violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. The class-action housing desegregation lawsuit against the CHA was named for Dorothy Gautreaux, who lived in all-black Altgeld Gardens, on the distant South Side. Although the judge ruled in favor of the Gautreaux plaintiffs, the case would be fought for years, all the way up to the Supreme Court. And Mayor Daley chose to put an end to almost all public housing construction rather than follow the court decree and build in white neighborhoods. From 1969 to 1980, Chicago would add little more than a hundred public housing units. Romney believed he could withhold federal assistance to any suburbs unwilling to add public housing as part of his Open Communities initiative. Already an outsider in Nixon’s White House, the housing secretary decided to develop this desegregation program without revealing it to the president. The plan would not go over well when it went public.
But first Romney toured Cabrini-Green. On a steamy August day, two weeks after the cop killings, he and Jesse Jackson walked the housing development. It was a strange scene. Romney moved at a typical breakneck pace, while members of Operation Breadbasket and the People’s Organization of Cabrini-Green formed a scrum around the two men, pushing aside reporters and residents. Jackson took the HUD secretary to the field where Severin and Rizzato had been gunned down, pointing out the snipers’ nests above. Romney and Jackson hustled over to 1150–1160 N. Sedgwick, the Rock, entering one of the apartments. With an entourage jogging to keep up, they surveyed the expanse of concrete surrounding the towers, and the tiny public swimming pool that locals dubbed “the Bathtub.” In Saint Dominic’s Church, residents told Romney about the conditions in Cabrini-Green. The rats and the broken elevators, the single mothers wiling away the days without hope, the gangs and the drugs, the promises of jobs and services that never came, the police reminding them with a drawn gun or a curse to stay put on their island of seventy acres. Romney was convinced. He announced that security alone wouldn’t be able to solve the problems at Cabrini-Green, and he left. Jackson, finding himself alone in front of the reporters, declared the day an extraordinary success.
Yet conditions at Cabrini-Green only worsened. Out of punishment and fear, the city stopped regular trash pickup. Residents, too, no longer thought about their home the same way. The murders and the police response brought many to a breaking point. Distressed over their own safety, elderly tenants were allowed to transfer to senior housing elsewhere. More than seven hundred families moved out of Cabrini-Green by year’s end, a fifth of the 3,600 households, almost all of them coming from the high-rises. Many people on the public housing waiting list opted to wait longer rather than accept a vacant unit in Cabrini-Green, which they’d heard so much about of late. Those who did move in were generally poorer and less stable than the tenants they replaced, and the portion of families on welfare and headed by a single parent both jumped to three-quarters of the total. The reality at Cabrini edged ever closer to the idea of it in people’s minds. Mayor Daley visited the White House in May 1971, telling Nixon that racial fears had wrecked public housing in Chicago.
“In some portions there are 750 vacancies in Cabrini-Green. And white people won’t move in,” Daley said.
“What kind of thing is it?” Nixon asked of the public housing development.
“It’s a white h
igh-rise, though it’s all black. But it’s a high-rise with a high percentage of crime.”
The urban planner Oscar Newman pointed to the design of high-rise public housing to illustrate his theory about the role that physical layout plays in abetting or preventing crime. Newman contended that superblock public housing lacked what he called “defensible space,” and therefore represented the worst of postwar modernist architecture. The towers were without through streets or commercial establishments, creating dead zones with no sense of shared ownership or communal supervision. That’s where crime was at its highest. In the words of Jane Jacobs—whose antimodernist vision from The Death and Life of Great American Cities guided a new breed of city planners—superblocks prohibited the self-regulating public safety from “eyes on the street” and the “normal presence of adults on lively sidewalks.” In public housing projects, the majority of the violent crimes occurred in isolated and unmonitored stairwells, laundry rooms, and elevators. City officials joked that the most dangerous public transportation in Chicago was a Cabrini-Green elevator.
When HUD had discretionary funds available for improvements at its most troubled public housing developments, the sensationalized coverage of Cabrini-Green left little doubt where the money would go. “We wanted to find the worst of the worst public housing projects,” a HUD official said. “The ones that because of physical deterioration, bad maintenance, problem families or overwhelming social conditions were really in trouble and need to be turned around. There were a number of factors considered. But in Chicago everyone knows that means Cabrini-Green.” With the federal money that soon came, and in conjunction with funding from several state, county, and city agencies, the CHA began a $21 million security pilot program at Cabrini-Green to combat its structural deficiencies. The lobbies in four of the high-rises were reconstructed. Access to the buildings was curtailed, with guard stations built to block anyone from entering without first being screened. Bright lights were installed, as were vandal-proof mailboxes, polycarbonate glazed safety windows, and toilets in the lobbies, so children wouldn’t relieve themselves in the stairwells. The four towers were outfitted as well with all-weather cameras that could capture images in the dark and with state-of-the-art closed-circuit TV systems for monitoring the elevators, stairwells, and perimeters of the buildings. The areas outside the high-rises were to be surrounded by chain-link and wrought iron fencing, brightly lit, and turned into grassy courtyards, so as to “increase the territoriality of individual buildings”—though these changes were never enacted. Neither was the promise to focus on “diversion as well as prevention,” measures that were to include new social service programs for drug and alcohol abuse, for juvenile offenders, for school assistance, and for women to learn self-defense and problem solving strategies.
This investment in Cabrini-Green, as incomplete as it was, came at a time when other cities were already giving up on their public housing high-rises. Like Cabrini-Green, St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe was a large public housing development, consisting of thirty-three identical eleven-story towers and a total of 2,870 units. It fell into incredible disrepair in a remarkably short time. The buildings were built poorly to start, without a sufficient number of playgrounds and with doorknobs and locks that broke upon first use; the St. Louis Housing Authority, too, was underfunded and inefficient, and Pruitt-Igoe residents rapidly became overwhelmingly poor, with the majority of their households headed by single mothers. And so in 1972, just eighteen years after the high-rises were completed, the Pruitt-Igoe towers were imploded with charges of dynamite. The televised image, with its mushrooming cloud of dust and debris, defined for many the popular notion of the public housing experiment—it had failed. The vision of decaying high-rises wasn’t representative of the country as a whole, even if it reflected the reality in cities like Chicago and St. Louis: three-quarters of the nation’s public housing units were not in high-rises.
No doubt there were many in Chicago who wished to do the same to the city’s public housing towers. But the idea of demolishing Cabrini-Green seemed like a political as well as a practical impossibility. It would involve the displacement of some fifteen thousand poor, black Chicagoans. In the previous decades when slums were cleared, those displaced were sent into public housing. Now where could people from the projects be sent? After hearing so much about their criminal exploits in the news, what neighborhoods would be willing to absorb them? Sure enough, when suburban areas learned about George Romney’s Open Communities proposal, they objected hostilely, and the program was scrapped before ever getting under way.
Instead of pursuing demolition, Chicago declared the security pilot program at Cabrini-Green a success. The first phase was completed at the start of 1977. Studies commissioned by the CHA showed that the renovated buildings experienced a 25 percent reduction in crime, a 38 percent drop in vandalism costs, and a 27 percent increase in tenant employment. The CHA reported that most of the empty units in the renovated high-rises were now occupied. The newspapers ran stories praising the effort: “Sunlight at Cabrini-Green”; “Cabrini-Green Revives.” “The Cabrini-Green homes, despite an image of violence and dark despair, has become in the last two years a more comfortable place to live.”
Hoping to build on the positive reports, the CHA marketed a new and improved Cabrini-Green, distributing an eight-page brochure of upbeat sepia photographs. The agency had in recent years sent mass mailings to families on the welfare rolls, trying to fill empty units in Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor. But this pamphlet showed a nuclear family of four enjoying time in their refined living room, children frolicking in a playground and a pool, and rowhouses hedged by shrubs and blossoming foliage. “Cabrini-Green Homes is a community that most Chicagoans think they know all about, and what they think of it is usually all bad,” the brochure offered as a corrective. “Located in the heart of Chicago’s vibrant Near North Side, Cabrini-Green Homes is changing into a place where you can be safe and secure.” The buildings were said to enjoy many of the same security features as the luxury doorman apartments along Lake Shore Drive, but with rents at a fraction of the cost and convenient off-street parking. “The Chicago Housing Authority expects great things from the new Cabrini-Green Homes, especially when families such as yours move there to help make that dream become a reality.”
KELVIN CANNON
THE REALITY ON the ground in Cabrini-Green, especially for young guys like Kelvin Cannon, just entering their teens, seemed less than dreamy. The Blackstone Rangers, the South Side gang headed by Jeff Fort, were then undertaking a citywide recruitment drive that included the Near North Side. Students leaving Cooley or Waller High would find a group of Blackstone Rangers with bats waiting for them outside. “What d’you represent?” they’d ask menacingly. “What’s your ride?” There were guys all over the streets near Cabrini wearing red berets and demanding to know what gang boys were in. The options were to say the Stones or to receive a beat down, though occasionally you’d get lucky—a teacher or a cop would appear, or the recruiter knew your older brother and would tell you under his breath to run.
On a summer day in 1976, when Kelvin was thirteen, he and his friends were playing strike out against their high-rise, the strike zone a spray-painted box on the sand-colored wall of 714 W. Division. Kelvin was in the outfield. A boy named Binky was pitching. Then five guys stepped between Binky and the batter. They were older, out of high school. By then the Blackstone Rangers had taken control of most of the Whites at Cabrini-Green. And now they were coming for Kelvin’s home.
One of the guys pressed his shoulder against Binky’s shoulder, their cheeks nearly touching, as the two of them turned together in the stomach-knotting slow dance preceding a fight. The older boy muttered incitements in Binky’s ear—You think you can beat me? He pushed Binky hard, as if about to begin, but then engaged again, leading him in another series of turns. It was all ponderous precursor to the violence, as if the young man were searching for whatever would rouse him to action. It came when B
inky tried to resume the game, stepping away to throw the rubber ball at the painted target. The Blackstone Ranger threw two quick blows to the pitcher’s face. Then all was movement. The other four Stones with him piled on the punches and kicks. Kelvin and his friends rushed to help. They outnumbered the Stones, and they found themselves outboxing them as well. That’s when one of the Rangers reached into his waistband, and everything went still. The pistol he pulled out was square framed and glinted in the light. He held it to Binky’s face.
“I ought to blow your motherfucking head off.” He raised the gun and cracked its butt against Binky’s temple. The boys from 714 W. Division scattered.
When they reassembled later that night in the lobby of their building, they were still jumpy with adrenaline. Kelvin and his friends replayed every detail of the brawl, reenacting the moments that words alone couldn’t capture. They’d held their own against twenty-year-olds. They weren’t hooked up with any gang, but they weren’t pushovers. For most of their lives they’d teamed up against other buildings for sports or snowball fights; three or four of them would head off together to the store to steal candy. “714 was the best in sports there was. So it wasn’t a surprise to us that we came out on top in fighting, too,” Kelvin would say. He was then lollipop framed, with a long, willowy body and a big round head of straightened hair. His dewy eyes and wide, fixed grin didn’t project menace, but there was little that he feared. He would gladly defend his building. “Bear arms,” was how the group of them put it. Some of their older brothers were back from Vietnam, and the boys had access to guns. Really they only wanted to show that they had guns just like the Stones had guns. They weren’t going out there like them, terrorizing people. They weren’t planning to shoot. But over the next months they did have gunfights with the Stones, and they took them on fist to fist, too. They managed to push the Stones back to Sedgwick Street, near the Marshall Field Garden Apartments. The Blackstone Rangers were forced out of most of Cabrini-Green. Kelvin liked to say that their resistance changed the course of history at the housing project forever.
