There was no lack of possible motives when Florence Scala’s home at 1030 W. Taylor St. was twice bombed in 1962. She thought that workaday folks should have a say in political decisions affecting them, and speaking truth to power can be dicey in Chicago.
The crime was never solved, but physical evidence revealed a link to another bombing. The type of dynamite found outside Scala’s house matched that used to bomb the Oak Park home of a precinct worker who, like Scala, was backing Richard Ogilvie, a Republican candidate for Cook County sheriff.
“The bosses of Mayor Daley’s machine in the 1st ward had already sent their muscle men to warn her and other women crusaders to get off the Ogilvie campaign,” Ogilvie said.
The Cook County state’s attorney, a Democrat, countered such accusations with an investigation of “all University of Illinois students who demonstrated against” Scala. She had incurred the students’ ire by campaigning against a U. of I. campus in her neighborhood that was championed by Mayor Richard J. Daley.
Scala’s house, its back porch shredded by dynamite, was a pawn in a high-stakes chess game. A thorn in the side of City Hall and other powerful interests, she was a hero to many in her community.
“She was a kind of Rosa Parks of the Italian American neighborhood,” wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, comparing her to the civil rights pioneer, when Scala died in 2007.
Scala’s father was a tailor with a shop on the first floor of the house. She and a brother were raised there, and when she married, her husband moved in with her family. Along Taylor and nearby streets were immigrant families with similar biographies. The Conte Di Savoia delicatessen was named for the ship that brought the proprietor’s relative over from Italy.
“What was so great about my neighborhood was that it was self contained economically,” Scala recalled in a 1997 Tribune essay.
“The plumber lived on Carpenter Street; the tailor shop was here; the fish store, across the street; the butcher, right down there; the guy who made the sausage down the block,” she wrote. “Your kids are going to school together. All of that, that’s what makes a neighborhood hum.”
Scala knew that the University of Illinois wanted to replace its Navy Pier branch, established to accommodate veterans returning from World War II, with another location in Chicago. The scuttlebutt was that it would move to Madison Street just west of the Loop, at the time a skid row.
But watching television in February 1961, Scala was shocked to hear that the campus would be built along Halsted Street, a principle artery of her neighborhood. Left in a similar state by the news were the owners of the more than 800 homes and 200 businesses that would be bulldozed.
“I remember one pastor, Father Italo Scola, standing up at a meeting and saying, ‘I have just become a citizen, and this is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and I feel as though I have been slapped in the face,'” Scala would recall.
On Feb. 14, 1961, Scala led a protest march from Polk Street and Blue Island Avenue to City Hall. “Mayor Daley and others think it is easy to run roughshod over us,” she told a pre-march rally. “We must show him we are not going to take this lying down.”
Daley invited them to come up to his office and promised them new homes and stores in another neighborhood. They turned him down. They wanted to remain where they lived.
The picketing continued and evolved into a sit-in. “This is politically inspired,” Daley dismissively told them.
“You can’t even talk to the man,” Scala said. “You start to ask him a question and he keeps on talking.”
In fact, Daley had a more pressing problem than a handful of women refusing to leave his office.
The site of the university campus was in the First Ward, whose Democratic organization was under investigation by the FBI. Should indictments follow, federal funding to build the campus would be endangered.
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The result was a jaw-dropping political makeover. A veritable master class in corruption, it provided a shot in the arm for Scala’s protest movement.
Under a May 19, 1963 headline, “New Strategy In First Ward: No Alderman,” the Tribune explained:
“Two reasons were cited: Party leaders do not want to reopen the scandal which forced Atty. Michael FioRito to resign, and crime syndicate leaders who shared in the maneuvers that preceded the slating of FioRito do not want to stimulate further Federal Bureau of Investigation investigation of their activities.”
The plan was to have “friendly aldermen” represent the ward’s interests for a year before holding a special election. Reporters asked 1st Ward Committeeman and former Ald. John D’Arco who might then be likely candidates.
“You’re asking a lot of questions and I’d have to go and talk to some people before I could give you the answers,” D’Arco replied.
Adverse publicity led to the election being advanced to Jan. 21, 1964. Scala ran against Donald Parillo, a Republican banker who moved into the ward two days before being endorsed by the D’Arco’s Democratic ward organization.
Scala said she was running “so that the people can be represented by someone who realizes their needs.” The Tribune reported that Parillo seemed defensive when asserting that he’d been “convicted without trial” of responsibility for the ward organization’s scandals.
“Don’t attribute the old mess to me,” he said during a debate with Scala. “I’m here to clean it up.”
Though Parillo won by a large margin, the mood was upbeat when the vote totals were posted on wrapping paper taped to a wall in Scala’s campaign headquarters, a church on Roosevelt Road.
“‘We’re not beaten,’ shouted Mrs. Scala, standing shoeless on top of a cabinet,” the Tribune reported.
“Look at the vote and look at these faces,” she said, referring to Parillo and D’Arco. “We scared you today and we’re going to come back and scare you again.
Another battle for Scala was trying to fight to save a remnant of Hull House, the social-service center for immigrants founded by Jane Addams.
Scala’s mother had enrolled her as a child in Hull House classes. That brought her face to face with independent women, Addams and her associates. Middle-class suburbanites, they’d come there to help the city’s poor — and were determined to cede nothing to a male-dominated society.
Scala and her husband had taken refuge in what was then a large complex of buildings that made up Hull House after their house was bombed. But as the university campus was built, all but one of 12 Hull House buildings were torn down.
Scala and her allies were able to save the original Hull House building, which became the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
Though her activist energies were drained, others were inspired by her conviction that, yes, an ordinary person can fight City Hall. In the 1970s, Scala’s father died and her husband suffered a stroke. After working in various jobs, she and her brother opened a restaurant in their father’s tailor shop in 1980. That end of Taylor Street had escaped the wrecking ball.
For 10 years, she cooked 12 to 14 hours a day in the Florence Restaurant, closing it in 1990 because she was “just plain tired,” she told the Tribune.
On Sunday afternoons in retirement, she and her dog would drive around the city through blocks renovated and thus unfamiliar to her.
Scala said she hoped that Maxwell Street — the Old World market where a rainbow of ethnic groups mixed — would endure. But it, too, was fated for gentrification into just another street she wouldn’t recognize.
“That should be saved in some decent form — not just a token, a chic little street shopping area,” was Scala’s prescription for Maxwell Street. “It should be just the way it is — wild, crummy and gutsy.”
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