It is hard now to look at drab, looming housing projects like Cabrini-Green or the Robert Taylor, ABLA or Henry Horner Homes and imagine that people once saw in them beacons of humane enlightenment.
But, following World War II, Chicago desperately needed to replace vast stretches of housing that had become rotting, reeking, rat-infested slums.
In the traditional “Black Belt” that started at Roosevelt Road and ran south to 63rd Street between Cottage Grove and Wentworth Avenues, blacks lived in conditions as crowded and as vile as anything in Calcutta. Since 1900, hundreds of thousands of southern blacks had migrated into the city and had been crammed into the 6-mile-long, mile-wide “Belt” until it could contain no more.
In terms of black urban culture, it became one of the fertile places in America. But in terms of raising families in safe, healthy surroundings, few places in the nation were worse.
It was an area set aside for blacks precisely because it contained some of the oldest, most decrepit housing stock in the city. So many people were jumbled in so small a space, almost any uninhabited cranny was converted to housing. In many instances, families were living in single-room apartments or in converted basement coal bins. Others took up residence in tin-can and scrap-lumber shanties in alleys.
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For them, public housing at first looked like an answered prayer as tens of millions of federal dollars went into building apartment blocks along the Black Belt from 1945 to 1965. Many thousands of families moved into bright, airy, roomy three- and four-bedroom apartments, for the first time enjoying hot and cold running water and central heat.
Who would complain that the apartments were in stark high-rise towers, such as the 28 identical 16-floor buildings that comprise the Robert Taylor Homes?
Post-war conditions were no better on the Near North Side around Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street. It was a neighborhood of creaking tenements, slapped up following the Chicago Fire in 1871. By 1951, many still had no toilets or running water.
A 1951 survey of the neighborhood by the Chicago Housing Authority shocked affluent Chicagoans.
The neighborhood’s 1950 unemployment rate was a staggering 35 percent. The risk of fire in the area’s tenements was four times higher than in the rest of the city, and the infant mortality rate was 2 1/2 times that of non-slum neighborhoods. Twenty percent of the families in the area, primarily black and Italian, were headed by a single parent.
A federally financed slum clearance program began razing the neighborhood in 1955 to put up modern high-rise apartments, ranging from 7 to 19 floors. Cabrini-Green, as the project was named, looked to be an improvement by anyone’s standards.
Over on the city’s West Side, it was pretty much the same story. Just behind the Chicago Stadium on Madison Street, where the Henry Horner Homes would rise between 1957 and 1961, old frame houses and brick apartment flats bulged with destitute families.
Just south of Roosevelt Road, going west from Blue Island Avenue, predominantly black tenants were jammed into similar, moldering homes and flats. Some were shanties when they were built in the 1860s by Irish immigrants and were never much improved by succeeding Jewish, Italian and southern black immigrants.
Now much of the old houses are gone, replaced by the ABLA Homes, a sprawling agglomeration of four public-housing projects. An acronym, it stands for the Jane Addams, Robert H. Brooks, Loomis Courts and Grace Abbott projects that spread through the neighborhood over a 30-year period.
Alvin Lewis, 60, now assistant pastor of Vernon Park Church of God, 9011 S. Stony Island Ave., as a child in the 1940s lived in a tenement where ABLA Homes now sits.
He, his eight brothers and sisters and his parents lived on the top floor of a 4-story walk-up at 1448 W. Washburne Ave. The place-worthy of the name “fire trap,” as it burned down while he lived there-had two bedrooms, no hot water and a coal-burning stove.
“I have a photograph of my old block,” Lewis said. “They were mainly frame houses and large brick apartment flats, pretty decrepit. The rats were everywhere, and a lot of kids got bitten by them, including me.”
Although the houses and apartments were crammed with people, he said each block was a community. Everybody knew everybody else, and adults wouldn’t let a neighborhood child get too far out of line before they were at the doorstep of the child’s parents.
Most of his street was populated by black families as poor as his own, Lewis said, but a lot of Jewish and Italian families lived in the neighborhood too, many of them running shops.
“The landlady, a Jewish woman named Mrs. Kargiman, was always extremely nice to my mother,” Lewis said. “Sometimes my folks just didn’t have the rent, and she’d understand. All the grocers were pretty understanding too.”
Eventually, after a fire in their apartment, Lewis’ family moved to a project themselves, the Altgeld Gardens townhouse complex at 130th Street and Ellis Avenue. That was in the days before high-rises, when the CHA struggled to keep projects on a smaller scale.
“To me, it (Altgeld Gardens) was movie stuff,” he said. “We had an upstairs and a downstairs, four bedrooms, hot and cold running water and central heating-things rich folks had.
“They (Chicago Housing Authority officials) had some pretty strict rules and regulations. If a child had three or four infractions, like theft or vandalism or getting picked up by police, the whole family was kicked out.”
In those days, the CHA was run by Elizabeth Wood, a public housing pioneer who had headed the agency since it was established in 1937.
Wood insisted on screening prospective tenants to find stable, two-parent families. She believed that public housing was a steppingstone for people working their way up the economic ladder.
She also insisted that public housing be racially integrated and scattered throughout the city, ideals that soon had her colliding with Chicago’s aldermen. They were willing to accept federal aid to clear the slums, but they insisted that all housing for blacks go into neighborhoods that were already mostly black.
The aldermen won. Wood was forced to resign from the CHA in 1951. After that, the monolithic projects on the order of Cabrini-Green and the Taylor Homes began to go up nearly unopposed.
They went up so fast, the CHA soon gave up on Wood’s exacting standards for screening tenants.
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Compacting too many troubled families into too small a space, the high-rises almost immediately lost their allure. Compared to the slum neighborhoods they replaced, the high-rises had tenants who were worse off. The occupants had higher unemployment rates, more teenage pregnancies and far more single-parent families and welfare recipients.
Heartbroken that her ideals had been ignored, Wood, who died at 93 in Atlanta two years ago, saw it coming.
“The next generation,” she once said in an interview, “will have to cure this generation’s blindness.”