63rd AND HALSTED: BASED ON A TRUE STORY
By Robert Klein Engler (09/27/06)
CHICAGO (27 September '06)--The street is torn up. We stop. A large backhoe crosses in front of us like a mechanical dinosaur belching exhaust and leaving a trail of dust. Near the corner of 63rd and Halsted, in what used to be the prosperous neighborhood of Englewood, the tower of the new Kennedy-King College rises from the rubble before us.
I drive with one of my students north on Halsted. You'd think a war occurred here. There are vacant lots everywhere thick with weeds and prairie grass, buildings are in shambles, and streets lead into shadows. What fire bombing happened while we were away? This is my city, Chicago, but the United States of America has moved elsewhere. I don't remember reading about that move in the local newspaper.
Instead, the Daily Southtown ran a story recently by Dan Lavoie celebrating the newspaper's one-hundredth anniversary. That newspaper began as the Englewood Economist in 1901, in a neighborhood that is now mostly in ruins. "I know it's hard for people today, when Englewood is in the news always as a very troubled neighborhood, to realize that it used to be a middle-class, suburban enclave," said Ellen Skerrett, a Chicago historian.
What began as a stagecoach station called Junction Grove in the 1840s, grew to be a rival to downtown Chicago for shopping and entertainment. In 1889 the Englewood area was annexed to the City of Chicago in time for the 1893 World's Fair. Nowadays, Englewood is a district of high crime, vacant lots and broken families. The glory days are gone, they have fled elsewhere, and so, too, the Daily Southtown. That newspaper was part of the flight it documented. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, or better said, the typewriting on the page, the reporters also fled southwest to the suburbs.
For a young man waiting at Fullerton to ride the downtown L, the city today is a fact, not a story, it is an opportunity, not a disappointment. He doesn't ask the reason for Englewood's decline because he never goes there. The way a spider builds its web in the corner by a station light, unaware of the train traffic in our world, so many young men in the city do their business, unaware or indifferent to what came before. We only learn the history of fire after we are burnt by it.
The Chicago Fire of 1871 burnt the city from south to north, devastating the downtown and near north neighborhoods all the way up to present day Fullerton. Visitors to Chicago know that the Chicago Water Tower stands as a memorial to that devastation. It was that devastation that also gave rise to increased settlement around the intersection at 63rd and Halsted. That community, eight miles south of the Loop, was to prosper and grow until the slow fire of segregation and politics destroyed it a hundred years later.
judging history
Are we being armchair historians, or worse, bigots, when we conclude that Englewood suffered something like a barbarian invasion? Is this a truth, my generation, does not want to talk about? The magical mystery tour those beaded hippies signed up for wasn't supposed to show them this destruction. Is the destruction of Englewood related to the social upheaval of the 60s and 70s, that the sociologist Peter L. Berger claims our science and analysis was unable to predict or at least apprehend? In Berger's words, "How could it be that some of the most privileged people on earth, indeed in history, turned violently against the very society that had made them thus privileged?"
When I was six years old, my father owned a house at 63rd and Carpenter, a few blocks west from Halsted. I went to Bass Elementary School with my older brother. On Saturday mornings, my mother would take me and my brother to see westerns at one of the many movie theaters that were near 63rd and Halsted. Roy Rogers was the great cowboy hero, then. I don't remember much of the movie plots, but I do remember sitting near her and looking up at the screen that was a silver light shining in darkness. The Englewood neighborhood during the late 40s was about 97 percent white.
I recall, too, one Christmas season going with my mother to the big Sears store that sat on the northeast corner of Halsted and 63rd. It was an art-deco designed store with no windows on street level, but was like a canyon inside. It was easy for a little boy to get lost there. The store was decorated for Christmas, and on the floor with the toys there was a grab bag station. You could put a quarter, a dime or a nickel into a coin slot, and out from the wall as a surprise would come a wrapped present. I wanted so badly to try that grab bag. "I don't have money to waste," my mother said. Then, she yanked me by the arm and we moved on to the stairs.
Later, for some mysterious reason, my father lost his job and we had to move. So, like thousands of other families, we moved west. There were rumors, too, about the neighborhood changing and not being safe any longer. My mother packed us up, and we took the CTA Green Hornet west on 63rd to Bell Avenue. I sat close to her as the streetcar clanged to a new house in a new neighborhood I didn't like as much as the old one we were leaving behind.
My father died at that house on Bell Avenue across from a coal yard. We were poor after that. Busses replaced the streetcars along 63rd. I went to Harper High School and after graduation attended Loyola University on an army ROTC scholarship. I would ride the bus to Loomis, then take the L downtown, sometimes stopping at 63rd and Halsted to shop. The Sears store was still open, but the area was considered undesirable by many. In the 60s the neighborhood around 63rd and Halsted became about 75 percent African-American.
I did not like attending college in the city, and with the little money I had saved, transferred to the University of Illinois at Urbana. Sometimes, I would ride the Illinois Central train back to Chicago for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I would get off at the I. C. Englewood Station and take the bus west to our house on Bell. The Englewood Station was a few blocks east of Halsted. This station was always dark and damp, and we had to walk from one island of light to another along the tracks until we took the concrete stairs down to the street and the bus stop.
At night, traveling west, we breathed a sigh of relief when the bus reached Ashland Avenue. In the 70s Englewood became 97 percent African-American. A process of social change helped along by the thousands who were displaced by the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway in the early 1960s, furthered the fall of Englewood. Property values had dropped also and crime then shot up. Englewood and the neighborhood around 63rd and Halsted was now on a course of irreversible decline.
When I went downstate to college, my younger brother took over my bedroom. Then, he went away to college and my mother moved to an apartment farther west on Mozart Street. After graduation, I got a job that took me to Europe, India and South America. I never lived in that house on Bell Avenue again. In 1983, the house where my father died burned down. All that is there now is a vacant lot covered by weeds and prairie grass.
The City of Chicago reluctantly tried to reverse the decline of Englewood by turning the 63rd and Halsted commercial district into a pedestrian mall in 1964. It didn't work. The mall became another failure, like the failed housing projects along State Street. One by one, Wieboldt's, Sears and other large department stores left the area. The Englewood mall was reopened to traffic in 1985, and then many of the buildings near the 63rd and Halsted intersection were demolished in early 2003 to make way for the planned Kennedy-King campus. This is what you see today as you drive north on Halsted past 63rd Street. There, the backhoes are busy abolishing the past.
By the 1990s, more than half of Englewood was living in poverty. Most of the homes were burned out or in need of repair. Then, in 1999, President Bill Clinton made a visit to Englewood. In a speech there he claimed, "there are people and places untouched by prosperity." For some this was an echo of hope. Others heard this speech as an example of the abject failure of Democratic urban planning. By then, I had seen enough to understand the policies touted by Clinton and Chicago's urban Democrats would not solve the problems of Englewood because these very policies had caused the problems.
Did the politicians know what would happen to Englewood if the social forces of invasion and succession were to continue unchecked for twenty-five years? If they did, then why didn't they stop it? Certainly, there was much good advice to be had about urban planning from professors at Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago. I suppose the answer here is like what happens often in Chicago and elsewhere--it was not in the interest of the politicians to stop it.
The history of Englewood's destruction is one reason why the urban Democrats cannot be trusted to change matters for the better there. Integration and assimilation of minorities was a failure in Englewood, yet this failure was necessary for the success of urban Democratic politics. Without the secure votes from the plantation that Englewood became, there would not be the Mayors Daley elected to office.
rebuilding is not reviving
As the Green Line L roars its way to the new nondescript station at 63rd and Halsted, should we blame the passengers for their fate? I suppose many of these men had no choice but to follow their fathers into history the way I followed my father. It is obvious, too, that they are disappointed by a politics that uses them as much as they are disappointed by their own bad habits. They may have destroyed what they did not understand, yet in turn they may be destroyed by those who do not understand them. These days, all the broken hearted ride the Green Line to Englewood.
Will the new $220 million Kennedy-King College revive Englewood when the old Kennedy-King College could have been repaired for an estimated $18 million? The answer is only if the Englewood neighborhood is again as racially integrated as the name of the college implies. Plans for such an integrated community are not available. Furthermore, who among Chicago's politicians even wants integration? If African-Americans were to become eleven percent of Englewood's population again, as they were in 1950, many politicians there would be voted out of office.
Lewis Mumford, who Malcolm Cowley called "the last of the great humanists" says that the city may be viewed as a container of our achievements. If this is true, then the city must contain our history, not erase it. If a community is to be revived, then it must revive its history. As far as anyone can see, the new Kennedy-King campus does not contain much history of the community or the dilapidated buildings it replaces.
The problem, of course, is not the dilapidated buildings in the first place, but the people who moved to live in them. They were the carriers of social disorganization. A sociological analysis of all the variables of race, income, age, etc. at work in Englewood's fall may conclude that so many factors were in play during the life cycle of the community, that it is impossible to say what caused what. In the end we are left with the morally relative conclusion that nothing happened. But something did happen. Englewood went from a prosperous community to a devastated one.
This is what we do know: All the while the transformation of Englewood was going on, the urban Democrats held political power in Chicago. They had more than twenty-five years to see what was happening. We also know that as Englewood went from white to African-American, it became worse and worse. Poverty, drug use and murders all rose. I conclude that either there were social forces in play that no one could control, or the urban Democrats used the destruction of Englewood to their own political advantage. The tragedy here, besides the destruction of a vibrant community, is the realization that those who claimed they were curing the communities ills, were in fact keeping the patient sick.
When the forces of globalization want to make everywhere like everywhere else, communities become homogenized and faceless, just like the international style in modern architecture. This community without a face is the destiny for Englewood. Look at the design for the new Kennedy-King College. Does it reflect anything of Englewood's history? Would anyone know about the life that was enjoyed at 63rd and Halsted fifty years ago by walking around this new campus? In fifty years, Englewood suffered a change on a scale unknown in ancient Egypt, and equal to the destruction of Dresden by fire during the Second World War.
Yet, Dresden is being rebuilt to look much the way it was before the fire bombing. The Frauenkirche was reconstructed. Englewood is being rebuilt to look nothing like it used to be. No Sears store is being rebuilt. No streetcars will leave from the L station. The powers that be do not want 63rd and Halsted to look like what it used to be, because if it did, then they would have to explain why it had to be rebuilt in the first place. Englewood is being rebuilt in the international style so that it will look the same as any other place. The new Englewood will be just like the new Hong Kong. History in Chicago must be replaced to make way for politics.
If those in their 20s today want a past they can walk through and recognize when they retire, then they must take political control of their present. It is either that, or flee the city like the generation before them. That generation may have fled to the suburbs for a better life, yet we must wonder also why they did not mount a vital community effort to save Englewood. Without that collective vision, the fall of Englewood is a story of cowards fleeing from cowards.
Now, with the influx of Mexicans to the southwest side of Chicago, who likewise neither integrate nor assimilate, are we to see act two of this barbarian invasion play out on Chicago's streets? Regrettably, the answer looks like it will be, "Yes." Even my mother and father, who lie side by side at St. Mary's Cemetery, could guess this coming. Already, the history of Marquette Park is being obliterated by illegal Mexican immigrants. After that, those politicians who brought us oblivion, may be in turn obliterated. It is not with satisfaction that we write the words, Sic transit gloria mundi.
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