“Neighborhood: Being a trend whore necessitates living at the Bucktown/Wicker Park border.” [so says Cindy Mathew on Metromix]

And to think that North Avenue, this blog’s namesake, used to be known for another, more honest kind of whore.

(Speaking of which, the latest neighborhood gossip is that bones were found in the basement of Lottie’s, a local bar which was once a brothel. The business is closed pending an investigation.)

A photo of mine — the first mini/urban Home Depot, on Halsted in Lincoln Park — made it into the Kansas City Star, of all places. Thanks to Kevin Klinkenberg for making the connection. (It’s a Knight-Ridder “RealCities” site; use username null@carskill.com / pwd carskill to get in.)

Ironically, the author writes: “The Chicago Home Depot has windows rather than blank walls. Its facade is properly scaled to fit the street… The people in that Chicago neighborhood got something different, in part because they had some notion of what they wanted their city to look like. Those desires were written into development rules.” In fact, the neighborhood went up in arms over a previous proposal to rezone the commercial site to build condos; the developer retaliated by plopping (as of right!) a giant gray box which generates even more traffic.

I kind of like how the angles of the buildings are contrasted. It’s hard to get a full-on shot of the store, since it’s so broad and fronts a two-lane road, but in this case it works.

…but I couldn’t help noticing today that condos at 2011 West Concord — along a tiny, half-block-long, brick-paved alley just half a block from Milwaukee, North, and Damen — are on the market. Two duplex-downs for $400K, one top-floor one-bedroom for $250K, in a vintage flats building with what must be a sweet roof deck. Sigh; that’s now average pricing for the location. Aside from a few blocks in Old Town, that block is as close as relentlessly gridded Chicago gets to the ambience of pre-industrial Greenwich Village or Beacon Hill.

Added bonus: the back door of Red Hen Bakery opens up onto the end of the street. Con: the most annoying bars in the neighborhood are at the other end.

Every section-line corner of Chicago, in photos.

A November article by Russ Stewart gives more background on the 32nd ward.

The race for 32nd Ward Democratic committeeman apparently is over before it began. From an email sent to volunteers for candidate John Fritchey today:

“I am very pleased to inform you that the discussions [“between myself and elected officials at every level of City and State government”] yielded results that simply would not have been obtained without us showing just how serious we are about obtaining significant improvements in our area. In general terms, the outcome of the discussions is as follows: 1) I have been given commitments that there will be no consolidation of the committeeman’s office with that of any other local elected officeholder; 2) I have received what I consider to be credible assurances that the needs of 32nd Ward constituents are going to be given a heightened and continued priority beginning immediately and continuing on a going forward basis.”

County clerk filing data shows that both Alderman Matlak and Fritchey have withdrawn their filings, leaving incumbent Terry Gabinski as the sole candidate. Many locals had pinned their hopes on this race, and specifically Fritchey, to sink the old Rostenkowski machine that has held the 32nd since the Depression. Gabinski was Rosty’s chief deputy, and Matlak was Gabinski’s protege. Indeed, the aldermen’s office adjoins the Democratic committee’s office, and title to both is still held by none other than Dan Rostenkowski. Essentially, whether or not Matlak or Gabinski holds the committeeman’s chair doesn’t matter; the effect is that the committeeman’s office is consolidated with the alderman’s office.

Historically, aldermen in Chicago have controlled both their position and the chair of the ward Regular Democratic Organization — thus solidifying both their power in City Hall and in the RDO machine. However, some have recently alleged that the role split between Alderman Matlak and Committeeman Gabinski has improved on that centralization of authority: tales abound of developers paying off Gabinski, who then calls the favor into Matlak’s office — thus maintaining the appearance of propriety, since contributions to the RDO aren’t watched as closely as contributions to the alderman’s campaign fund.

That both Matlak and Gabinski filed for the upcoming race led some to wonder whether the machine had fractured. Independent constituents were lining up behind Fritchey, who’s well known in the ward’s northern reaches as the State Senator for much of the north lakefront yuppie belt — but who has less name recognition in west-side Bucktown and Ukrainian Village, which gentrified more recently and thus maintain Latino representatives in Springfield and Washington. Fritchey’s name recognition and unrest within the community over development would have provided a substantial base for a challenge.

This announcement ends a race which could have been interesting: the yuppies who now dominate the 32nd have little need for the traditional “ward services” (e.g., patronage jobs) disbursed by the RDO to newly arrived immigrants. For instance, the Hispanic Democratic Organization has had great success marketing The Machine to Mexican immigrants in areas like Back of the Yards (12th ward), Cragin (30th ward), and Southeast Chicago (10th ward). The RDO’s victory in the 44th last year — tossing its support behind Tom Tunney in Lakeview, thus endearing itself to that neighborhood’s assimilationist gays with a candidate who also had independent credentials — proved that its marketing muscle is still unmatched. Some speculated then that the proto-yuppie “lakefront liberals” who opposed Richard J. have been placated by Richard M. and his flowerbeds.

Since many yuppies are technocrats, they would seem to demand technocratic (transparent, efficient) government — the antithesis of the old ward system, where all city services were cloaked behind the alderman’s office in order to extract favors from seekers of said services. Perhaps the overall political apathy of the day has dimmed this group’s drive for good government.

Furthermore, a decade under the tyranny of Richard Daley the Second has led to increased unrest on City Council and in city politics. An political axis has formed between Mu�oz, Colon, and Flores, the three non-HDO affiliated Latinos on City Council, and the progressive organization surrounding Toni Preckwinkle in Hyde Park — creating an interesting, progressive foil for the Daley machine, committed to transparency and a progressive social agenda.

Also, the election for Democratic committeeman was to have coincided with the hotly contested primary election for U.S. Senate and president (although the latter will likely be over long before March), thus raising voter turnout above dismal municipal-election levels. There could have been something interesting to report in March, but there won’t be.

Landmark Theaters has reportedly signed a lease with Holsten to build a art-house multiplex in the Wilson Yard redevelopment, at Broadway and Wilson in Uptown. Although certainly movies are an appropriate use in what was one of Chicago’s premier entertainment districts, the opening of the Landmark Century Center (and art houses in Evanston and Highland Park, keeping North Shore moviegoers closer to home) has cut into ticket sales at the Music Box. The new theater site is similarly near the Music Box, but offers even better access to the Red Line than any existing north side theater.

Talk about signing a theater chain for subterranean space at Block 37 (to complement the Siskel, but perhaps too close to the new River East megaplex) has gone nowhere. Similarly, plans for screening revivals at old moviehouses in out-of-the-way Portage Park and Bridgeport have stalled despite overflow crowds at the annual Outdoor Film Festival in Grant Park. It seems there won’t be enough indy or foreign films to fill the screens (and my dreams of ever seeing a movie on the west side — besides the City North and Lawndale multiplexes — seem all the more distant now); revivals and niche ethnic markets seem like long shots as well.

Some public housing redevelopment schemes will need an extra push to get started. Reinventing the local public schools sounds like a good idea, but the results of school reform are famously slow to arrive — and may not arrive quickly enough to put a happy new face onto a notorious neighborhood.

A tiny off-Loop theater troupe called Cardiff Giant went under in Chicago, got resurrected in NYC, and then hit it huge with Urinetown.

As with Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses,” the success of “Urinetown” is firm evidence that the kind of original work that goes on here in storefronts (even unlicensed storefronts) every season is the same kind of work that wins major awards elsewhere and is hailed in New York as revolutionary even 10 years after its Chicago creation. And yet had “Urinetown” become a fringe Chicago musical — which it was inches away from becoming — it likely would have run here for a month and then sunk without a trace in a city that still seems woefully unable to propel its homegrown properties to national prominence and longevity — unless those artists involved ship out for the coasts and start all over.

I may manage to sleep through my alarm most days, but did manage to wake up for a massive explosion down the street. For the first few seconds, there was silence, then sirens. By the time I was outside, just a giant plume of smoke. Later, glorious silence as traffic on North Avenue was detoured.

A revised South Side bike tour is here–see the extended entry.
Continue reading →

[Illustrations stripped. In late 2005, much of this information was added to the Wikipedia entry on Cabrini-Green.]

A short history of Cabrini-Green
Prepared by Payton Chung for AIAS Forum, 1 January 2003
The site upon which Cabrini-Green now stands has been labeled a shantytown, a slum, or a ghetto since its first settlement in the 1850s. The city of Chicago was incorporated in 1837 as a trading post at the mouth of the Chicago River. The town grew quickly in the following years, with trading of goods leading to the establishment of industries along the river. Tanning, meat-packing, lumber, warehousing, and eventually iron rolling and machine parts factories set up along the river and along the railroad that ran along the north bank of the river’s main branch (indeed, under today’s Sheraton).
The residential area immediately inland from the river began in the 1850s as a shantytown of largely Irish factory workers looking for housing convenient to factory jobs. The area changed dramatically over the next few decades as industry filled the southwest quadrant (then known as Smoky Hollow after its low valley location near polluting factories; now known as River North and better known for theme restaurants and art galleries), pushing the residential area further north, as transportation to the Loop improved with streetcars and bridges, and as successive waves of immigration pushed older residents out (typically further north) and pulled new residents in. Over time, the only name which seems to have stuck was Little Hell, after the smoke and flames from a nearby gas plant and the miserable living conditions found there. Ethnic succession was accompanied by the filtering down of the residential stock; few improvements were made to the housing stock over time, and overcrowding increased as industry and commerce moved closer and land prices rose. As a result, housing conditions worsened considerably over time.
The Irish were soon replaced by Germans, who in turn were replaced by Swedes; many of the residents left homeless when fire leveled the Near North Side in 1871 were Swedish or Norwegian. A second wave of Irish immigrants arrived, renaming the area Kilgubbin or The Patch. In 1903, a large number of Sicilians moved into the area, giving it the name Little Sicily. One 1929 sociological study described Little Sicily as the poorest, most crime-ridden part of town, home to a “Murder Corner” infamous for gangland slayings.

Figure 1. Juvenile delinquents in Little Sicily. [Harvey Zorbach]
In the 1910s and 1920s, the area—which never had the restrictive covenants which kept other parts of the city segregated by race, religion, and ethnicity—became more racially mixed, as African Americans from the South arrived during and after the wartime industrial boom. By World War Two, the African American population in particular had grown considerably, leading to severe overcrowding. The wartime construction of the Frances Cabrini Homes — low-rise townhouses in a grid pattern, 75% white and 25% black, with residents hard at work on the war effort — was an early experiment in public housing in America. By most accounts, it was a well-maintained success, providing quality housing for the working poor.
The concurrent shift of city housing policy, federal housing policy, and local employment in the decades immediately following the war led to the project’s decline. Mayor Richard J. Daley obsessively tore down many Black Belt neighborhoods, building in their place high-density housing projects which could contain the rapidly growing African American population without threatening the racial “invasion” of the city’s jittery White neighborhoods. To that end, cheaply and quickly built ten thousand units in high-rise housing projects throughout the inner city – in many cases supported by local leaders, who welcomed any new investment in their overcrowded communities. The Cabrini Extension and Green Homes high-rises along both sides of Division Street were built under this policy. (This strategy’s racist motives were confirmed by federal courts in Gautreaux vs. CHA in 1969.) The federal government reinforced this strategy by gradually changing the rules for admission to public housing: income limits were lowered and racial discrimination (which, in this case, did serve to keep African Americans out in the name of integration) was outlawed. As a result, the population of the housing projects became overwhelmingly African American and very poor.

Figure 2. Daley’s big purchase. [Chris Ware]
At the same time, the city’s economic base was changing rapidly as the industrial employment base collapsed. From 1953 to 1999, the city lost over 350,000 industrial jobs; the downtown area alone lost over 100,000 industrial jobs since 1972. In fact, the total number of jobs downtown—despite the spectacular growth in the office employment base, with service employment doubling between 1972 and 2000—remained largely stable from 1972 to 1996. The rising educational demands of the new service employment regime, though, effectively shut the door on low-skilled workers like those living at Cabrini-Green, leading to their effective isolation from downtown’s booming economy.
The rapid decline of industry and general flight from the city – Chicago lost a million residents between 1970 and 1990 – led to widespread abandonment throughout the city, but particularly in its poorer quarters. The blocks immediately surrounding housing projects like Cabrini-Green went vacant as residents and businesses left. City government, reacting to political and fiscal pressures, cut services to many housing projects. Train stations serving projects were shuttered, police patrols ceased, and schools were written off. The CHA effectively stopped maintaining units: lawns were paved to reduce maintenance costs, light bulbs blinked off, vacant units were left unlocked, water and fire damage went unrepaired. Deferred maintenance rendered thousands of units uninhabitable. The result was a near total isolation of the housing projects from the life of the city. The lawlessness of the projects in many ways was a logical outcome of their isolation from legal forms of social organization. Over the years, a number of publicity stunts (most notably Mayor Jane Byrne’s week-long residence in Cabrini-Green) made a charade of caring, but no substantive change ever happened in the projects.
The downtown economic boom also led to the gentrification of the surrounding areas. The original base of wealth along the Gold Coast (just a mile west of Green Homes) stretched north into Old Town and Lincoln Park in the 1920s; along with it, an artists’ colony sprouted in the Old Town area. Gentrification spread from there, pushing several miles north along the lakefront to Edgewater, then hopping west across the river into Wicker Park and displacing the Loop’s former industrial belt from the Near South to River West. By the mid-1990s, Cabrini-Green was surrounded by gentrified neighborhoods. Upper-income homebuyers edged closer to the project each year.
On 13 October 1992, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was shot and killed by a sniper as his mother walked him to school in Cabrini-Green. His death made national headlines and embarrassed the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley (Richard J.’s son) into taking action. In 1994, the Chicago Housing Authority received a HOPE VI grant from the federal government to begin planning redevelopment at Cabrini-Green. In 1997, the Near North Redevelopment Initiative plan was released; it recommended demolishing most of Cabrini-Green (leaving only the original rowhouses intact) and replace it with a dense, mixed-income, mixed-use community.
The current plan currently includes demolition and redevelopment of the later, high-rise portions of Cabrini-Green with low- and mid-rise buildings. New developments on adjacent vacant parcels are receiving city subsidies to provide 505 units of public housing, typically with no more than 20% public housing units. Developments within the 70-acre Cabrini-Green site will set aside 30% of their units for public housing. Overall residential density in the Near North Redevelopment Area will increase to about 55 units per acre, since then-vacant parcels will house new residents, but density within the project site will decrease. The plan does not stipulate architectural form, but so far, developments have taken on a neo-traditional look in vernacular Chicago multifamily housing types: two-flats, coach houses, rowhouses, three- and four-flat walk-ups, and courtyard apartments. (Interestingly, a Modern proposal by Brian Healy won an architectural competition for another CHA redevelopment site – and several new glass and steel luxury high-rises are under construction within view of Cabrini.)
To prepare for demolition, public housing tenants are given Section 8 vouchers when their leases expire, or are offered a scattered-site public housing unit elsewhere. (The 2,000 scattered-site units are primarily found in working-class areas of the city.) Vouchers technically allow tenants to rent almost any private market apartment in the city or suburbs, but a combination of landlord discrimination and a lack of transition support for tenants have resulted in many tenants ending up in other poor, segregated neighborhoods.
Residents of Cabrini-Green have criticized the plan as a land grab, pointing out that fewer than half of the original 3,000 public housing units will remain, and that Cabrini-Green residents have no right to return to the Near North Side. (Tenants of new public housing units in mixed-income developments are selected through a separate, stringent process.)
In 1999, the Chicago Housing Authority released a “Plan for Transformation” which will demolish 18,000 units, including every open-gallery high-rise, while building or rehabilitating 25,000 units of public housing. New developments will include 21-44% public housing, but on average, one-third of units in new developments will be public housing.

Further Reading:
Marco D’Eramo, The Pig and the Skyscraper (Verso, 2002). An excellent overview of Chicago’s social geography, including a chapter on Cabrini-Green.
Alan Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto (reprinted Chicago, 1998).
Elizabeth Taylor & Adam Cohen, American Pharaoh (Little, Brown, 2001).
Sudhir Venkatesh, American Project (Harvard, 2000). A contemporary ethnography of residents in Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago’s largest housing project; includes discussion of residents’ coping strategies and the CHA’s current attempts to dismantle the projects.
Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum (Chicago, 1929, reprinted 1983). An early sociological analysis of the Near North Side, including extended discussion of Little Sicily.

Points of interest
Public housing
a. William Green Homes (“the whites,” high-rises north of Division). 1962, Pace Associates. The most infamous buildings on the site, sharing an open-gallery design with many other Richard J. Daley-era public housing projects. The open galleries, intended as “streets in the sky,” eventually became notorious as lookouts for snipers. To be demolished upon vacation.
b. Cabrini Extension (“the reds,” mid- and high-rises south of Division). 1958, A. Epstein & Sons. Substantial demolition has already begun on these buildings; the remainder will be demolished within a year. Part of this site will be redeveloped as North Park Village.
c. Frances Cabrini Homes (low-rises south of Division). 1942, Holsman, Burmeister, et al. These rowhouses will be rehabilitated, not demolished.

Residential redevelopment sites
A. North Town Village. The largest, most ambitious mixed-income development to date; 241 units on seven acres adjacent to Green Homes. 30% of the units are occupied by former public housing tenants, 20% are affordable to moderate-income families, and half have been sold or rented at market rates.
B. Orchard Park and Mohawk North. The earliest mixed-income developments in the area, built on city-owned land away from the projects in 1996-1998. The neo-traditional architectural form of these developments has been carried over into other local redevelopments.
C. Near North High School site. This site, formerly home to a high school (since replaced), is now available for mixed-income residential development.
D. Old Town Village East. One phase of mixed-income development, this on the former site of an Oscar Meyer sausage factory. MCL, the developer of this site, also developed Mohawk North and is the largest homebuilder in the city. 28 public housing units out of 140 condominiums.
E. North Town Park. The first redevelopment to take place within the boundaries of Cabrini-Green, this will be a 18.4 acre, 650 unit (195 public housing units) development by Holsten-Kenard, the developers of North Town Village. It will replace Cabrini Extension North, the first high-rises to be torn down.
F. Old Town Village West. Another brownfield redevelopment by MCL, also mixed-income.
G. River Village at Kingsbury Park. 107 four-story townhouses surrounding a one-acre park and marina. Kingsbury Park is a thirty-acre, mixed-use redevelopment of the former Montgomery Ward corporate headquarters site; it will include about 2,600 dwelling units, office, retail, industrial, and new parks at buildout. The section of Kingsbury Park north of Chicago Avenue (that is, within the boundaries of the Near North Redevelopment Initiative) includes 10% public housing replacement and 10% “affordable” units
H. Domain Lofts at Kingsbury Park. 288 lofts (priced up to $1 million) and parking in the converted Montgomery Ward Warehouse building, including 16 public housing units.

Civic and commercial redevelopment sites
1. New City YMCA. The southeast corner of North and Halsted, long owned by the New City YMCA, has been sold for retail development. The city rezoned Clybourn to commercial use as a buffer between industrial areas along the river and gentrifying Lincoln Park to the east. National retailers, drawn by the large parcels and favorable demographics (high population density, high average incomes), have moved into a regional mall’s worth of retail here.
2. Cubs Care Park. This miniature stadium was donated by the Chicago Cubs to the YMCA.
3. Old Town Square. This basic strip mall fails in its attempts to echo the Prairie School details of Seward Park. However, it provides employment for many local residents and, for now, houses what’s probably the world’s most incongruously sited Starbucks.
4. Seward Park & Fieldhouse. The Seward Park Fieldhouse, a 1908 design by Prairie School master Dwight Perkins, was rehabilitated in 1998. Seward Park was also expanded north of the Fieldhouse to front on Division Street.
5. Near North Branch Library. The first branch library in this area, opened in 1999.
6. New elementary school. A new elementary school adjoins Seward Park.
7. 18th District Police Station. This police station, replacing an older facility further east, opened in 2002. The city has constructed several new police stations from prototype designs in recent years
8. 600 W. Chicago Avenue. A rehabilitation of the historic Montgomery Ward Catalog Building, including high-technology offices and ground-level retail fronting both street and river.