For decades, the northern wall of the Cook County Jail has been a brooding counterpoint to the lively Little Village neighborhood a little farther west along 26th Street.
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The 25-foot-tall wall, topped with razor wire, stretches for 800 feet along 26th Street from the back of the Leighton Criminal Court Building to Sacramento Avenue, within view of the iconic arched gateway to “La Villita” and its bustling commercial district.
There are no sidewalks or trees beneath the stucco-covered concrete wall, which instead looms gray and ominous over abandoned railroad tracks and dirt paths worn through the weeds and windblown trash.
But if artists and community activists have their way, the wall could soon be transformed into a massive mural telling the story of the jail, the neighborhood and the complex relationship between the two.
The project, still in its infancy, has garnered the support of the Sheriff’s Department, and organizers have begun the task of raising the estimated $1.5 million they believe will be needed to create the mural and renovate the parkway at its base.
But no one yet knows what the finished project might look like, which is fine with muralist Maria Gaspar, 32, who came up with the idea several years ago over beers with a friend.
“What do walls represent? The sort of border we all live with, both physically and emotionally and psychologically. There’s this emotional quality that feels very brutal,” said Gaspar, who works with Chicago Public Art Group and grew up in Little Village.
“So that’s why, for us, it isn’t about a design; it’s not about a set of images. It’s ‘How can this project gather those kinds of stories?'”
Gaspar and other supporters said they intend to spend much of next year raising money and talking with residents, inmates, the Sheriff’s Department and others to gather as many points of view as possible about what the mural should say. If all goes well, they hope to complete the wall and the grounds beneath it by 2016.
Last month, Special Service Area No. 25, which funds beautification efforts and other improvements in the Little Village area, granted $15,000 to the Chicago Public Art Group to pay for temporary exhibits near the wall designed to spark interest in the mural and help with fundraising.
“It’s the entryway into our business corridor,” said Nilda Esparza, executive director of the Little Village Chamber of Commerce, which oversees the Special Service Area. “We’re just glad that we’re able to serve as a resource to the project because of the potential that it will bring to the corridor.”
Officials at the Sheriff’s Department said they feel “positive about the project and excited about its potential,” department spokeswoman Sophia Ansari said.
“At that meeting several months ago, they brainstormed ideas about having the community present ideas and having the youth work with artists,” Ansari said. “There was also discussion of having Cook County Jail detainees do some prep work on the wall through the inmate worker program.”
The jail has been a fixture in the neighborhood since 1871, when the city of Chicago moved its jail to the site. In 1928, Cook County began construction of its own jail there, and the two facilities operated independently until they were combined in 1969.
Over the next several decades, the jail continued to expand in an effort to combat overcrowding, and now it sprawls across 96 acres on Little Village’s southeast side.
At about the same time, the neighborhood was transforming demographically, as longtime residents of German and Czech descent gave way to a huge influx of Mexican immigrants who built Little Village into one of the largest Mexican communities in the nation.
Mike Rodriguez, 34, said his parents were part of that wave, and he remembers taking the 26th Street bus past the wall day after day on his way to school.
“I remember thinking as a kid, ‘Why did my parents choose to live in a community that has a jail as one of its most prominent pieces of architecture?'” Rodriguez said. “But as an adult, I figured out why. It (Little Village) is a hardworking community; it’s a sign of the aspirations of immigrants. And I want to project that on the jail, rather than have the jail define my experience as a resident.”
Rodriguez serves as executive director of Enlace Chicago, a nonprofit community organization based in Little Village that is partnering with the Chicago Public Art Group — or CPAG — to try to move the mural from concept to a reality.
CPAG has funded or promoted hundreds of murals and other public art installations throughout the city over the past three decades. Executive Director Jon Pounds said he believes the project would be the largest of its kind in the nation.
The mural would not be the first to be painted at a correctional facility. Other jails across the U.S. have allowed inmates to paint mural art as a way to help rehabilitate them and provide inspirational messages.
Nor would the Cook County Jail project be the largest in the world undertaken at such a setting. That distinction was once held by an 860-foot-long, 14-foot-tall mural on a wall at Pudu Prison in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The painting, which has since been razed along with the prison, featured jungle scenes painted by an inmate in the 1980s.
Another ominous-looking wall was used as a canvas for stories and statements — the Berlin Wall, which was famously festooned with an ever-changing, multilingual collage of mural art and common graffiti.
Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, whose 7th District includes Little Village, said the idea of creating a mural on the Cook County Jail wall presents a unique opportunity to tell complex stories about the neighborhood and crime and changing ideas about how justice should be carried out.
“I think this idea of developing artwork that reflects on the history of the jail and the larger community is a great opportunity to represent something that transcends what has been a very grim, somber reminder of incarceration and imprisonment,” Garcia said.
“And while the jail continues to serve the function of holding detainees awaiting trial, I think it has a positive potential to be a good neighbor where positive messages, history, culture can be represented.”
Pounds said he believes the sobering purpose for the wall should be part of whatever story the mural may someday tell, because it is part of the history of the neighborhood and the lives of those who live there.
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The mural “can’t just be a happy representation of a strong community,” he said. “Because just as architecture changes over time, ideas about criminal justice change as well. This is really an opportunity to think forward on a really old wall.”
That approach is the right one because they will need to have broad consensus about what the mural will represent for the project to move forward, said James Yood, adjunct professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Yood said that any differences of opinion must be ironed out among all the interested parties beforehand, recalling a disastrous clash between famed muralist Diego Rivera and the Rockefeller family, which commissioned him to paint a mural on Rockefeller Center in New York City in 1932.
The mural was largely completed when Nelson Rockefeller noticed that a portrait of Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin had been incorporated into the piece. Rivera refused to remove the portrait, and the Rockefellers halted the project and eventually destroyed the mural.
“It always sounds great on the front end — ‘Up with people’ and ‘This will be a redeeming act’ — and often it is,” Yood said. “But it would be naive to argue that there might not be differences down the road. One little portrait of Lenin in a mural caused that whole mural’s destruction. So what’s going to happen when one alderman or one employee or someone doesn’t like what one figure is doing in the mural? That’s where the problems are.”
Dahriian Espinoza said the jail was an ever-present source of background unease as he grew up in Little Village.
“It was something that you’d always see. … You’re kind of afraid of it, and you don’t want to be there,” said Espinoza, who works as a community and economic development specialist at Enlace Chicago. “I’m extremely excited about the potential.”