The End of an Urban Nightmare, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #216

April 4, 2011 Mike Gold 0 Comments

As your typical obnoxiously proud Chicagoan, you’d think I’d bitch about the removal of an entire neighborhood. After all, I’ve endlessly caterwauled about New York City’s very own Doctor Doom, the hideously evil Robert Moses. So it seems only fair that I speak up against his scions in the Midwest, doesn’t it?

Actually, I do speak out against these wannabes of urban destruction. But I’m okay with the people responsible for the destruction of the entire Cabrini-Green neighborhood on Chicago’s near-north side, smack dab in the middle of some of the most expensive and trendy real estate in America.

The whole high-rise thing seemed like a good idea after World War II, when housing was at a premium, poor folk were priced out of their apartments and the black migration north up the Illinois Central train tracks exacerbated already over-crowded conditions in the South Side slums. Building started in 1942 as a manufactured Italian neighborhood set at the edge of what had been a frighteningly dangerous Irish neighborhood.

Massive public housing seemed like a good idea at the time. NIMN (“not in my neighborhood”) is a hardly a recent phenomenon and scooping up the poor and dumping them in bleak, featureless concrete beehives solved a lot of problems. As public housing proliferated across the east, tribal paranoia set in. As Cabrini-Green attracted more black people, the Italians and other white folk left for brighter pastures. Cabrini-Green became a mammoth black area that would soon suffer the same neglect that tenants thought they had left behind. Once it became black turf, the city found it an excellent place to save money.

At the very start, the three L stations nearest the complex were shuttered. As time progressed their lawns were paved over, the fire department was slow to respond, repairs took months to make. The crime rate skyrocketed when police patrols were cut back severely due to “budget shortfalls” that didn’t affect the nearby Gold Coast. Those who could leave… did.

Cabrini wasn’t the most horrible neighborhood in Chicago, nor was it even the worst housing project. That honor went to the Robert Taylor Homes, just on the other side of I-90/I-94 from White Sox park and the home of both Mayors Daley. But Cabrini-Green’s plight was made public in, of all things, a sit-com. That’s where the show Good Times was set.

Good Times. As it turns out, I don’t know squat about cynicism.

Chicago was a city of ethnic neighborhoods, not built on intolerance per se but on the reality that first generation immigrants like to stick together. This usually dissipates by the third generation, but when blacks and Hispanics move into a neighborhood the neighboring communities erect an invisible shield so thick Colgate could have used it for their commercials. Whereas Chicago has a high crime rate, a preposterous percentage of this comes down in two large neighborhoods: Englewood on the south side, and Lawndale on the west side. Gangs still run these areas, their gunmen tend to run towards the pre-adolescent side and are jumpy and inexperienced. If you don’t have to be there, you aren’t.

(Well, actually, I did a comic book store appearance in Englewood back around 1992. I had a great discussion with the fans and their parents in a until about 11 PM. I parked in front of the store, and nobody messed with me, my girlfriend, or my car.)

Now, imagine packing all those feelings and emotions into a concrete community with limited city services and a repair program that would have been laughable in Paleolithic times. 15,000 humans mired in hell.

My involvement in the community was peripheral. I was born at Cabrini Hospital, but that was before “Cabrini-Green” was built, and it was a bit south of that turf in Skid Row. I lived a couple blocks north of Cabrini for a few years; only us hippies would get that close to the cauldron. I was involved in various political actions in the neighborhood, and I was pushing a crisis intervention program located a half-mile north. But for some reason I failed to develop an emotional connection to Perdition.

Target may build a store in part of the Cabrini-Green turf; this would be a dramatic improvement. Thirty years ago it was thought the area’s gentrification was forthcoming given the rising property values in the adjoining areas.

That’s how evil Cabrini-Green was. I can’t imagine anybody really missing the place. The disease is still there; we’ve got to find another cure.

Thanks to Glenn Hauman for recommending the art that, of course, is from Give Me Liberty and is copyright 1990 Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, who predicted the whole thing – right down to the year.

Gadfly, anarcho-syndicalist and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.