Talk:Cabrini-Green
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Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. This article has been tagged since January 2007. |
(Specifically, the section on tenant activism needs expansion--need information on pre-1996 tenant activism)
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While this article does seem to violate NPOV in several places, I think the overall tone is not too far from wrong. :(
I grew up in Chicago during the '60s and '70s and my mother was a police woman on the streets of the city. Cabrini-Green was notorious.
All we have to do to bring NPOV into this is to cite some sources and look for counterpoints if we are able to find them.
Can we get a picture of one of the buildings? Dralwik 15:21, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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Most of what I've done has added, not changed, what was there before--so the intro part still violates NPOV, although I hope I've done better by talking about context and plans. Also, I'll see about getting some historic photos up, as I do have them around (on paper, of course). paytonc 4 Aug 05
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The first sentence reads: "Cabrini-Green, comprising (...) one of the most notorious and infamous housing projects in the world.". Shouldn't that read "of the US"? I did not want to change it right away, as I am not familiar with the subject and it may indeed be famous all over the world... Jope 15:52, September 7, 2005 (UTC)
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I am new to Wikipedia & still trying to figure out how all this works, so, apologies if I have made mistakes. Here's where I'm coming from.
It's true, Cabrini-Green was a horrible, horrible place to live. I know someone who worked there as an after-school tutor and remembers being stuck in the basement because there was so much gunfire they couldn't leave the building. She also said there was only one elevator in the big high-rises and it was always broken, so disabled people were literally trapped. Good thing there was never a big fire. In response to Jope, I think Cabrini-Green likely was known beyond the U.S. as a symbol of the problems of public housing in the states, for reasons I describe under "reputation" in the article.
But there were several ways the original article distorted the picture away from NPOV, I think.
First, it did not explain why things got so bad. For one thing, there was no reference to the city's role--the city was the landlord, and as such, was responsible for most of the things that were physically wrong with the buildings.
Another omission was that, while there was some reference to the geography of the situation, geography's impact was not really drawn into the explanation of why the residents ended up in such a hellhole. It's important to understand the causal factors in the changing neighborhoods surrounding Cabrini-Green--from the disappearance of jobs to the emergence of a market for drugs.
In my view, the former article's failure to explain how Cabrini-Green got so bad seemed to imply that it's just inevitable that, if you put poor Black people in a building, it will then just fall apart. My explanation tries to assign responsibility for the problems more realistically.
The second major problem with the article was that it did not take the residents' point of view into consideration. This is a huge oversight and sadly typical of the way stories in the U.S. are often told about African-Americans without consulting their perspective.
An outsider might think it's crazy that some residents want to stay at Cabrini-Green, but clearly that is the perspective of some residents, so it should be in the article. (After all, things have improved recently, and also, when you hear that some people see their only alternative as homelessness, it makes a little more sense.)
Although my attempts to include residents' point of view are not adequate and probably not NPOV, it's a beginning. More info about tenant activism would also help portray the diversity of residents--not all were gangsters or helpless victims, although some were.
I know there has been a lot of tenant activism long before 1996, but I ran out of time to research it. Maybe I will get back to it, but if not, someone else can! Vcrs 04:56, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
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[edit] more pictures please
I added this article to Wikipedia:Requested pictures. The only current picture is very recent and doesn't capture the hopelessness depicted in the article. Tempshill 06:48, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
This is a good idea. I don't have any old pix showing the now-demolished buildings, but I could definitely go take some of the situation at the moment. I've walked through there a couple times recently; it's pretty bleak. Thanks Tempshill. Vcrs 22:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
- I added one of the demolition, how's that look? --W.marsh 04:58, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] "Girl X"
Do we have ANY proof of the bit claiming to know what her real name is/was? 68.39.174.238 04:31, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
- This is what I'm referring to. 68.39.174.238 04:32, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
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- Nevermind, I missed the link about a line down D:... 68.39.174.238 04:36, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Language
I'd expect an encyclopedia to use terms like 'police officer' rather than 'cop'. -- 18.252.6.96 03:35, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Gangsta City?
The section on the film "Gangsta City" seems poorly-written and in violation of NPOV. It reads like ad copy. Thoughts?
is "Gangsta City" on dvd? --76.16.97.155 02:17, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] How many people lived here.
In paragraph 1, the article claims that 20,000 people once lived in Cabrini-Green. Later in the article the max figure drops to 15,000. Can we get a more accurate maximum size? >25% error seems like too much. 167.191.250.81 01:49, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
