Shyly poking their heads into the Ain’t That Sweet Cafe, the two teenage boys marveled at the new ice cream shop on South State Street. They had just one question: “You mean there’s no bulletproof?”
No, owner Maua Henderson recalled telling them. She knew residents were accustomed to the bulletproof glass of the neighborhood’s gas stations, liquor stores and rib joints. She figured a shop without the forbidding barriers would send a message that she wants to bring more than a good cone to an area that has long defined urban poverty in America.
“I’m not just scooping up ice cream,” said Henderson, who grew up a few blocks away in the Chicago Housing Authority’s Ida B. Wells development. “You’re educating people about a new way of life.”
Her crusade is but one small part of a broad effort to transform what for decades has been a community in paralysis–among the nation’s poorest neighborhoods, stifled by joblessness, crime and squalor.
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Last week, the Chicago Public Schools and the CHA announced a sweeping effort to revitalize the area’s schools, an ambitious attempt to complement the changes under way with the demolition of entire stretches of public housing high-rises along the Dan Ryan Expressway.
The plan is meant to strengthen the connective tissue of the neighborhood: better educating its children, attracting new homeowners and supporting entrepreneurs like Henderson.
In the process, community leaders and city officials hope to raise the hopes and expectations of those who consider this neighborhood home, even as they have endured decades of miserable conditions.
The area in question, stretching from 31st to 47th Streets and from the expressway to the lake, was once a thriving community of grand boulevards and gray stone mansions where music legends such as Louis Armstrong stayed.
Years of failed public housing policy, as well as drug and gang activity, took their toll: Today, with many of the CHA high-rises torn down and huge swaths of vacant land between the buildings still standing, the landscape resembles an old man who has lost most of his teeth.
“When I look out here, my concern is for the next generation,” said Ald. Dorothy Tillman (3rd), glancing out the window of another new coffee shop, Spoken Word Cafe, at 47th Street and Martin Luther King Drive. “What do we leave them? Do we leave them in a state of dependence or a state of independence?”
The transition, though, can be difficult. The razing of CHA high-rises moved thousands of families. Many of them are supposed to return once replacement housing is constructed–town homes scattered along gentrifying blocks rather than towering clusters of low-income people. But those new units, some 7,000, won’t be completed for years.
In the meantime, many of those CHA residents have been relocated to other city neighborhoods or the suburbs with rental assistance.
Relocation troubles
Some who still live in the area, like Yurvae McClarin, say they’ve watched neighbors whose families lived for generations in CHA housing simply forced out.
Picking up her 1st-grade daughter Keitara, 6, from Beethoven Academy, 25 W. 47th St., McClarin said the changes in the neighborhood weren’t totally welcome.
“They are kicking so many people out of the neighborhood and putting them all so far away from the schools and the shopping areas. Kids have to be bused to schools,” said McClarin, who has lived in the area for 23 years. “The people who are here, I think they like it. They’ve been here for so long. If they can’t afford to be here then where will they go?”
Such tensions are playing out in the few new stores opening along the State Street corridor. A few days before Ain’t That Sweet Cafe opened just south of 43rd Street, a Family Dollar store held its grand opening.
Many older residents welcomed a discount shop so close to home. But they warned Russell McKay, one of the security guards at the store: “You’re going to have your hands full with the thieves.”
Family Dollar sought to hire residents from the immediate neighborhood, but most failed the required drug tests, according to McKay. That led to some confrontations with some of the younger men from the community, who McKay said threatened to burn down the store.
But other residents are grateful to have a clean store with reasonable prices and decent selections. “They should be glad there’s something close to them,” said Margaret Patterson, 35, who was born and raised in the neighborhood.
Across the street, Henderson has had an easier time of it. Before she officially opened and could start charging, she offered free ice cream in the cafe’s rear garden one afternoon. Two hundred people showed up to snack on cones and listen to a group of “bucket boys” from the Taylor Homes play their makeshift drums.
Community spirit
The city health inspector who showed up to check out the place was less enthusiastic. “You think the community is ready for this?” the inspector said.
“Do you live in the community?” Henderson recalled asking her.
No, the inspector replied.
“Then how do you know what the community is ready for?”
A few blocks away, the Second City comedy troupe plans to open a satellite venue in a run-down brick building–the same place Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his base of operations when he came to Chicago in the 1960s to push for open housing.
Andrew Alexander, co-owner of Second City, said he understood it would take time for the neighborhood to be revitalized. For that reason, his group hopes to focus on training local actors in the facility, which is set to open in late 2004.
Second City is expecting to get money from the federal empowerment zone program–a massive effort to spark development in poor urban and rural areas–to pay for renovation of the building.
“It’s going to take years. It’s a slow development process,” Alexander said. But “it is in an area that is coming back to life.”
Across the street, the local alderman sat in a plush armchair with pillows at Spoken Word Cafe as New Age flute music filled the room.
“We’re trying to mark our community and be proud. We want people to know where you are,” Tillman said as she looked at the new Harold Washington Cultural Center, a long delayed, multimillion-dollar project she hopes to see open “real soon.”
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Tillman said she supported last week’s Chicago Public Schools announcement. But she is resentful that they’re making the effort now that the community is starting to improve. In effect, she said, “the school board is saying that they didn’t care about the schools here before the CHA transformation.”
For all the talk of redevelopment, Tillman contended that many “working poor” families from the demolished CHA buildings have been unable to find affordable alternatives. “I have homeless people coming to my office who used to live in the buildings,” she said.
Looking to future
Last week, Rebecca Coleman, who lives in one of the few remaining CHA high-rises, picked up her four children from McCorkle School, 4421 S. State St. She said she welcomed the change–to her children’s school and to the larger community–and hopes the area will become more integrated, both financially and culturally.
Her dream is to have more single-family homes in the area. “Everybody that stays in these complexes are not people who are on public aid,” Coleman said. “A lot of these people are at work and they have their own families. [But] they are not in a position to move out to another neighborhood.”
New homes would be a welcome shift for Coleman and the remaining residents of 4429 S. Federal St. One of the last high-rises remaining from the Taylor Homes’ original 28, it has become a hot zone of drug dealing.
One night late last week, dealers and their lookouts swarmed the ground level of the building, where the only way through the lobby was past a young man who frisked any strangers and up a stairwell cluttered with drug customers.
The young men control the building with impunity.
Just across a frozen, vacant stretch of land, though, Henderson has visions of an entirely different kind of community, a place where those young men will have other ways to make money.
With its high ceiling and exposed brick, Ain’t That Sweet looks like a piece of Lincoln Park plopped down amid the battered shops that have made up commerce on this stretch of the South Side.
A former English teacher, she offers free tutoring every Tuesday evening at her ice cream shop. The walls of the cafe are covered with the work of local artists.
Above the shop on the second floor, she has opened commercial space for start-up businesses that would offer a legal alternative to the drug trade.
To that end, those who want to rent there have to abide by one rule: They must mentor a neighborhood high school student.