| Cabrini–Green | |
|
1999 photograph looking northeast on |
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| Location | Chicago, Illinois United States |
| Status | almost completly demolished |
| Constructed | 1942–1962 |
| Demolished | 1996–2011 |
| Governing Body |
Chicago Housing Authority |
Cabrini–Green was a Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) public housing development on Chicago's Near North Side. It was bordered by Evergreen Avenue on the north, Orleans Street on the east, Chicago Avenue on the south, and Halsted Street on the west. Today, only a set of row houses, built in the 1940s, still remain (south of Oak Street, north of Chicago Avenue, west of Hudson Avenue, and east of Larrabee Street). At its peak, Cabrini–Green was home to 15,000 people,[1] living in mid- and high-rise apartment buildings totaling 3607 units. Over the years, gang violence and neglect created terrible conditions for the residents, and the name "Cabrini–Green" became synonymous with the problems associated with public housing in the United States.
The last of the buildings in Cabrini–Green was demolished in March 2011.[2] The area has been undergoing a redevelopment since the late 1990s, into a combination of high-rise buildings and row houses, with the stated goal of creating a mixed-income neighborhood, with some units reserved for public housing tenants. Controversy regarding the implementation of these plans has arisen.[3]
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Cabrini–Green was composed of 10 sections, built over a twenty-year period: the Frances Cabrini Rowhouses (586 units in 1942), Cabrini Extension North and Cabrini Extension South (1925 units in 1958), and the William Green Homes (1096 units in 1962) (see Chronology below). The construction reflected the "urban renewal" approach to United States city planning in the mid-twentieth century. The Extension buildings were known as the "reds," for their red brick exteriors, while the Green Homes, with reinforced concrete exteriors, were known as the "whites." Many of the high-rise buildings originally had exterior porches (called "open galleries").
According to the CHA, the early residents of the Cabrini row houses were predominantly of Italian ancestry.[4] By 1962, however, a majority of residents in the completed complex were black. Crime and radical culture change drove whites from the complex over the following decade; by the 1970s, its population was almost entirely black.
As of May 3, 2011, all high-rise buildings have been demolished. The Frances Cabrini Rowhomes (south of Oak Street, north of Chicago Avenue, west of Hudson Avenue, and east of Larrabee Street) still remain inhabited and are not set to be demolished.
Poverty and organized crime have long been associated with the area: a 1931 "map of Chicago's gangland" by Bruce-Roberts, Inc. notes Locust and Sedgwick as "Death Corner": "50 murders: count 'em".[5] At first, the housing was integrated and many residents held jobs. This changed in the years after World War II, when the nearby factories that provided the neighborhood's economic base closed and thousands were laid off. At the same time, the cash-strapped city began withdrawing crucial services like police patrols, transit services, and routine building maintenance. Lawns were paved over to save on maintenance, failed lights were left for months, and apartments damaged by fire were simply boarded up instead of rehabilitated and reoccupied. Later phases of public housing development (such as the Green Homes, the newest of the Cabrini–Green buildings) were built on extremely tight budgets and suffered from maintenance problems due to the low quality of construction.
Unlike many of the city's other public housing projects like Rockwell Gardens or Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini–Green was situated in an affluent part of the city. The poverty-stricken projects were actually constructed at the meeting point of Chicago's two wealthiest neighborhoods, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast. Less than a mile to the east sits Michigan Avenue with its high-end shopping and expensive housing. Specific gangs "controlled" individual buildings, and residents felt pressure to ally with those gangs in order to protect themselves from escalating violence.
During the worst years of Cabrini–Green's problems, vandalism increased substantially. Gang members and miscreants covered interior walls with graffiti and damaged doors, windows, and elevators. Rat and cockroach infestations were commonplace, rotting garbage stacked up in clogged trash chutes (it once piled up to the 15th floor), and basic utilities (water, electricity, etc.) often malfunctioned and were left unrepaired. On the exterior, boarded-up windows, burned-out areas of the facade, and pavement instead of green space—all in the name of economizing on maintenance—created an atmosphere of neglect and decay. The high "open galleries" were enclosed with steel fencing along the entire height of the building to prevent residents from emptying rubbish bins into the yard, from falling, and from being thrown off to their deaths (giving the visual appearance of a large prison tier, or animal cages, which further enraged community leaders).[6]
In response to the various problems associated with living in Cabrini–Green, residents have organized over the years both to pressure the city for assistance and to protect and support each other.
In 1996, the federal government mandated the destruction of 18,000 units of public housing in Chicago (along with tens of thousands of other units nationwide). In response, some Cabrini–Green tenant activists have organized to prevent themselves from becoming homeless and to protect what they and their supporters see as a right to public housing for the city's poorest residents. The activists succeeded in obtaining a consent decree guaranteeing that some buildings will remain standing while the new structures are built, so that tenants can remain in their homes until new ones are available.[7] The document also guarantees displaced Cabrini residents a home in the new neighborhood.
In 2001, a tenants group sued the CHA over relocation plans for displaced residents of Cabrini–Green under the city's Plan for Transformation, a $1.4 billion blueprint for public housing renewal. Richard Wheelock, an attorney representing the tenants, said the authority's demolition program had outpaced its reconstruction program, thus leaving families with few options beyond similarly or identically dangerous and segregated areas elsewhere in the city, or simply being forced out of the residences and becoming homeless.
Though Chicago has had a number of notorious public housing projects, including the Robert Taylor Homes and Stateway Gardens on the South Side, and Rockwell Gardens and the Henry Horner Homes on the West Side, Cabrini–Green's name and its problems were the most publicized, especially beyond Chicago. Cabrini–Green often gained press coverage for its chaotic New Year's Eve celebrations when gang members fired guns into the air causing police to block off nearby streets every year.
Several infamous incidents contributed to Cabrini–Green's reputation. In 1992, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was killed by a stray bullet while walking to school with his mother. In 1997, nine-year-old "Girl X," was raped and poisoned in a stairwell, leaving her blind, paralyzed and mute.[8] Members of the infamous street gang, the Gangster Disciples, who controlled most of Cabrini–Green, were ordered by the gang's leaders to find the person responsible for the crime and brutally assault him. The attacker, Patrick Sykes (who was not a gang member), was later apprehended by police and sentenced to 120 years in prison.[9][10]
An unanticipated result of the steel fencing installed to secure the previously open gangways at Cabrini–Green was that it became difficult for police officers to see through the steel mesh from outside; in 1970, two policemen were killed by snipers.
In 1981, gang killings that killed 11 made national attention.[11]
In an effort to demonstrate a commitment to making the complex safer, then-Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne moved into a fourth-floor apartment with her husband in 1981.[11] Backed by a number of police officers and a substantial personal bodyguard detail, she stayed for only three weeks. This incident, too, contributed to public perception of Cabrini–Green as the worst of the worst of public housing. As a security measure, the rear entryway of the unit Byrne stayed in was welded shut. This had the unforeseen impact of creating a fortification for gang members when Byrne left. Many other gangs copied this technique in other units.
While many non-residents regarded Cabrini–Green with almost unalloyed horror, long-term residents interviewed by a Chicago Tribune reporter in 2004 described mixed feelings about the end of the Cabrini–Green era.[12] They told the reporter that, in the face of their shared hardships, many residents had developed bonds of community and mutual support. They lamented the uprooting and scattering of that community, and worried about what would become of the residents who were being moved out of the old buildings to make way for new development.
Since the 1980s, a Catholic lay worker, William "Brother Bill" Tomes, Jr. frequently visited Cabrini–Green in an effort to stop the violence. His efforts received national attention and he was interviewed by Time magazine and several television networks.[13]
While Cabrini–Green was deteriorating during the postwar era, causing industry, investment, and residents to abandon its immediate surroundings, the rest of Chicago's Near North Side underwent equally dramatic upward changes in socioeconomic status. First, downtown employment shifted dramatically from manufacturing to professional services, spurring increased demand for middle-income housing; the resulting gentrification spread north along the lakefront from the Gold Coast, then pushed west and eventually crossed the river. Then, in the 1980s, the Lower North Side industrial area (just across the river from the Loop, west of Michigan Avenue, and south of Cabrini–Green) was transformed into the "River North" neighborhood, a focus of arts and entertainment. By the 1990s, developers had converted thousands of acres of former industrial lands near the north branch of the Chicago River (and directly north, south, and west of Cabrini–Green) to office, retail, and housing.
Over time, Cabrini–Green's location became increasingly desirable to private developers. Speculators began purchasing property immediately adjacent to the projects, with the expectation that the complex would eventually be demolished.
Finally, in May 1995, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development took over management of the CHA and almost immediately began demolishing the first of the vacant "reds" buildings in Cabrini Extension, intending to make Chicago a showpiece of a new, mixed-income approach to public housing. Shortly thereafter, in June 1996, the city of Chicago and the CHA unveiled the Near North Redevelopment Initiative, which called for new development on and around the Cabrini–Green site. Under a ten-year Plan for Transformation, which was officially enacted in 2000, the city plans to demolish almost all of its high-rise public housing, including much of Cabrini–Green (except the original row houses, which will remain).[14] Demolition of Cabrini Extension was completed in 2002; part of the site was added to Seward Park, and construction of new, mixed-income housing on the remainder of the site began in 2006.
Subsidized development of mixed-income housing on vacant or underused parcels adjacent to Cabrini–Green, including a long-shuttered Oscar Mayer sausage factory, the former headquarters of Montgomery Ward, and an adjacent senior housing project named Orchard Park, began in 1994. New market-rate housing now almost completely surrounds the remaining public housing.
Cabrini–Green once housed 15,000 residents. New housing built on the 70-acre (280,000 m2) Cabrini–Green site will include 30% public-housing replacement homes and 20% "workforce affordable" housing, while many adjacent developments (almost all targeted at luxury buyers) include 20% affordable housing, half targeted as public-housing replacement, with a goal of 505 replacement units built off-site.
In February 2006, a unique partnership between CHA, Holsten, Kimball Hill Urban Centers and the Cabrini–Green LAC Community Development Corporation began a 790-unit, $250-million redevelopment of the 18-acre (73,000 m2) Cabrini Extension site, to be called Parkside at Old Town. Plans for the demolition and redevelopment of Green Homes are still under negotiation, while the original Cabrini row houses are currently undergoing rehabilitation.
The Plan for Transformation's relocation process was the subject of a lawsuit, Wallace v. Chicago Housing Authority, which alleged that many residents were hastily forced into substandard, "temporary" housing in other slums, did not receive promised social services during or after the move, and were often denied the promised opportunity to return to the redeveloped sites.[15] The lawsuit was settled in June 2006, as the parties agreed to two relocation programs for current and former CHA residents: (1) CHA's current relocation program, encouraging moves to racially integrated areas of metropolitan Chicago and providing for case-managed social services, would be applied to families initially moving from public housing; and (2) an agreed-upon modified program run by CHA's voucher administrator, CHAC Inc., would encourage former CHA residents to relocate to economically and racially integrated communities as well as give them increased access to social services.[16]
Some former CHA residents have moved out of Chicago to nearby suburbs such as Harvey or to other housing developments in nearby cities. New residents have successfully moved into CHA replacement housing, and to date, residents of the mixed-income developments have reported fewer problems. The last two families in Cabrini–Green were forced out by a federal judge's decree on Dec. 1, 2010.[17]
Crime has dramatically decreased as the area's population has shifted; in the first half of 2006, only one murder occurred. Since most of the new housing post-dates 2000, no census figures are yet available. Demolition of Cabrini–Green continued slowly and is expected to be completed in 2011. Plaintiffs in Wallace and others allege that CHA's hasty removal of residents has exacerbated socioeconomic and racial segregation, homelessness, and other social ills that the Plan for Transformation aimed to address by forcing residents to less-visible but still impoverished neighborhoods, largely on the south and west sides of the city.
A public art project is planned concerning the demolition of the last Cabrini–Green high-rise.[18][19] The 1230 North Burling Street building, whose last resident left in December 2010, was demolished starting on March 30, 2011 and concluded May 3, 2011. Although Target has not confirmed this, it is reported the retail chain will build on the site at Division and Larrabee Streets, formerly occupied by 1230 N. Larrabee and 624 W. Division high-rises of the Green Homes.[20]
Most of the Cabrini–Green teenagers attend William H. Wells High School CPS. Waller High School, now known as Lincoln Park High School (Chicago), operated by Chicago Public Schools, also serves area students.
Near North Career Metropolitan High School located at Larrabee and Segwick evolved from Cooley Vocational High School and served area students from the 1980s until 2000.
At Cabrini–Green's height when over 15,000 residents lived in the neighborhood, there were five neighborhood elementary schools operated by Chicago Public Schools serving the neighborhood: Byrd Community Academy, Jenner Academy of the Arts, Manierre School, Schiller Community Academy, and Truth School. As of 2008, only three of the schools remain in use.
During the 2003–2004 school year, fifth-grade students from Room 405 at one of the neighborhood schools developed a comprehensive action plan to push the City of Chicago and the Chicago Board of Education to fulfill an old promise of building a new school for the community. They cited that their school had no lunchroom, no gym, and no auditorium. The heat often did not work and students were forced to wear hats, gloves, and coats in the classroom, among many other inadequacies. As they researched reasons for the decrepit and shameful conditions of their school, they examined issues related to equity in school funding. To further their cause and implement their plan, the young activists wrote letters and emails, surveyed, petitioned, interviewed legislators, developed and produced a DVD, video documentaries, and a website [8] in an effort to "get the word out" and garner support in hopes of seeing the new school built. Their fight for the new building garnered local and national attention.[21] As of 2008, the school's students have transferred to other schools in the Chicago area and the school has been left vacant.