Winter, and Pulaski and Madison

If you saw my last post, you know it was based upon my comments to the items on a list compiled by Time Out Chicago of things Chicagoans would like to see "ghosted" in this city. (The original list was published last Halloween, hence the term). Most of the items on the list were general in nature, things like traffic, the weather, food, certain biases of Chicagoans, etc. However, one item stood out to me as it mentioned along with the weather, a very specific place in the city which inspired a post of its own, actually two posts.

Here's the item:

Winter, and Pulaski and Madison.

I don't have a problem with winter in Chicago, in the winter that is. I'm not too crazy about winter in April and May however, which is not uncommon here.

I do have a personal connection with the area around Pulaski and Madison on the West Side of Chicago as long ago, it was the location of my pediatrician's office. 

Consequently, I will always associate it with the painful shot in the rear end I would receive at the end of each visit. Perhaps the commenter who singled out this specific corner of the city has a similar association with it. 

But I doubt it.

 

  

The corner of Madison and Pulaski, March 5, 2023

My late cousin Bob Hoggatt used to refer to the West Side Irish of Chicago as "lace curtain Irish". Look it up if you don't know the term. One day I asked him how then he would characterize the South Side Irish, such as himself. His answer, typical for him was hilariously self-deprecating but, uncharacteristically crude.

I'll just leave it to you to imagine what he said. 

Driving west on Washington Boulevard past Sacramento, Bob's assessment of the West Side rings true today as the magnificent gold dome of the Garfield Park Fieldhouse comes into view as you pass the ornate facades of the elegant late nineteenth and early twentieth century houses and two flats, those that survived decades of turmoil and neglect on the West Side.

The fortunes of the neighborhood around that park first took off after the construction of two elevated lines in the 1890s. Madison Street, between the two lines, became the main drag after the L tracks cast a permanent shadow over Lake Street, the previous main thoroughfare. 

Just west of the park, the intersection of Madison and Crawford, later named Pulaski Road, was the heart of one of many neighborhood "downtowns" that sprung up throughout Chicago at that time. So large and successful was the Madison/Pulaski Shopping District, that it served as the commercial, entertainment and business center for the entire West Side throughout the first half of the twentieth century and beyond.

But it was the twenties when the area really boomed, seeing the construction of grand hotels, department stores, and two movie palaces, the Paradise and the Marbro, both of whom rivaled the Chicago Theater in the Loop in opulence and size. Perhaps the most conspicuous symbol of the success of the area was the construction of the Midwest Athletic Club which, when it was built, was the tallest building between the Loop and Des Moines, Iowa. The building still stands, you can see it in the background of the photograph above. 

The boom ended as it did everywhere, during the Great Depression. But the neighborhood kept plugging along mostly intact through the difficult thirties and forties, with the exception of the Athletic Club whose building became a hotel. Many of the "lace curtain" residents left for lacier dwellings to the west. They were replaced by new residents, many of whom were immigrants from South, Central and Eastern Europe and their offspring. The community then took on a more working class feel. 

That is illustrated by the construction of a Goldblatts Department store in the shopping district in 1951. Goldblatts for decades had been recognized as the "workingman's Marshall Fields", whose stores were always situated inside architecturally impressive buildings, despite the discount prices they offered inside. 

It was the construction of one of their stores or their chief competitor Wieboldts, sometimes both, that set into motion the development of the commercial centers around them. 

 

Not so at Madison and Pulaski where Goldblatts was bringing up the rear.

Here is a photograph of the grand opening of the store on the SE corner of Madison and Pulaski featuring its bold Mid-Century-Modern entrance in April of 1951.

The same building, greatly altered, can be seen on the right in the contemporary color photograph above.

I'm sure the store's appearance in the district made many of the remaining lace-curtain types who like my mother would have never set foot in a Goldblatts, throw up their hands and say: "well there goes the neighborhood!" 

But the riches-to-rags story of the community would come a decade and a half later. It's sadly a familiar theme in Chicago, and many similar cities around the country.

 

It begins with a rumor, usually propagated by phone calls, often in the middle of the night. "The neighborhood is changing..." says the voice on the line, "and it's time to get out or else".  It usually took only a few bites before panic set in and pretty soon practically everyone on the block was packing their bags and heading out. What they meant by "changing" as you may be able to guess if you've been around these parts long enough, was that black people were starting to move in.

Now in a just and perfect world, nobody would bat an eye over something like that. After all, in a big city like Chicago, neighborhoods change all the time. As we just saw, West Garfield Park had already gone from lace curtains to vinyl window shades. But that change took place over a couple generations and was the result of upward mobility of families, both those leaving, and the new arrivals. In other words, they moved on their own terms. This was different. 

Black people immigrated to Chicago for the same reason as members of other ethnic/racial groups before and after them including my father. In a word, that reason was opportunity. Most of the black people who came to Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century (commonly referred to as "The Great Migration"), came from the rural American South, especially the Mississippi Delta. hoping to leave behind poverty, the injustice of institutional racism, the brutal share-cropper system, and perpetual second-class citizenship. The rapidly growing industries of Chicago provided the opportunity of work, a steady paycheck, and the hope for a better life. 

Chicago was never a particularly welcoming place for new groups of arrivals. The Irish, the Germans, the Bohemians, the Poles, the Jews, the Italians, the Chinese, and many other groups, all faced discrimination and hatred when they came here en masse. Quite often the worst abusers were members of the group who had just proceeded them. But the sum of all that hatred directed at those groups would not add up to a fraction of what was directed at the black people of Chicago. The tragic story of Chicago, the Segregated City, is based upon the fact that when black people moved into a neighborhood, white people almost invariably left, quick as their legs could carry them. 

For many, the reasons for "white flight" are simple. If you ask one group, they might say it was about personal safety and property value. Ask another group and they'd say it was flat out racism. They're both right to an extent but the story is much more complicated than that. There were bad actors to be sure, plenty of them. Add to that, bad public policy, bad life choices, bad business decisions, bad landlords, bad faith, bad blood, bad parenting, bad luck, bad logic, bad manners, bad timing, bad choices, bad this, bad that, and a whole lot of good people, black and white, caught in the middle. 

Those middle-of-the-night phone calls were not idle threats. 

The people on the receiving end probably didn't know anything about the city's long-standing discriminatory housing covenants that determined where black people could live and where they couldn't, forcing people into over-crowded, dehumanizing slums. 

They more than likely didn't know about the disinvestment caused by federal government maps of neighborhoods which lending institutions used to color code communities depending on their viability. The neighborhoods with red lines drawn around them, 

hence the term "redlining", were almost always in the city, consisted of older housing stock and more often than not, were (or were about to be) inhabited by black people. These neighborhoods were deemed too risky to lend money to. Consequently, the communities lacked the funding from banks necessary for home improvement, new development, and any hope to keep them alive and vibrant. 

It's also unlikely they knew about the true motives of those blockbusting callers, contract sellers who bought up property at bargain basement prices then turned it around overnight, well above market value and financing it themselves while charging exorbitant interest rates. These people made a killing by preying off the fears and prejudices of the white people they bought the property from, and the lack of other options for the black people to whom they sold the property.

Nor did the white folks understand many other systematic, pernicious discriminatory practices that all but guaranteed segregation in the city and second-class status to people of color.

What they did know was what they could see with their own eyes: once thriving neighborhoods deteriorating rapidly not long after black people moved into them.

The people in West Garfield Park didn't have to look far. In 1951 when Goldblatts opened at Madison and Pulaski, there were virtually no black people living in the community. That same year in neighboring North Lawndale to the south, the population was 13 percent black. Ten years later that number was 91 percent. It wasn't merely the complexion of the community that changed in a decade, the new arrivals found massive unemployment as the moribund industries in the area were not hiring, at least not to them, and despite the population of the community at an all-time high, due to redlining, no new housing to speak of was constructed, which resulted in the rapid deterioration of the existing housing stock and the infrastructure of the community.

By 1960, the black population of West Garfield Park was 16 percent. Given the rapid change next door, there was legitimate concern and tension in the neighborhood, especially following a riot in 1965 sparked by the death of a young black woman who was accidentally struck by a Chicago Fire Department vehicle.

After that incident, virtually the entire West Side of Chicago became a tinder box ready to explode.

It wasn't a match that set the tinder box ablaze, but a bullet.

Martin Luther King Jr. was no stranger to the West Side. As part of his "Campaign to End Slums", in 1966, King and his family moved into an apartment at 1550 South Hamlin in North Lawndale. It was during that time when Dr. King led marches for open-housing in the then all-white neighborhoods of Gage Park and Marquette Park on the South Side and also in the suburb of Cicero. 

Needless to say, Dr. King was not warmly welcomed as the beloved figure of peace and love who just wanted all of us to get along, as he is pictured today among members of the white ultra-right. I vividly remember the parents of my best friend at the time rhetorically asking: "Why doesn't that colored guy just mind his own business?" Those were some of the milder comments about him, It was on August 5th of that year in Marquette Park, where King was hit in the head with a rock, inspiring this statement: 

I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’m seeing in Chicago.

Not a quote seen too often in collections of quotes about our great city. 

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and cities all over the country went up in flames. While there were flareups in the more established black communities of the South Side, cooler heads there prevailed and community leaders, including gang leaders, intervened to help control the damage.

But not on the West Side. 

Here is a link to a short film produced by the CFD (obviously told from their perspective) on Chicago's West Side riots after Dr. King's assassination.

It made so little sense to so many, especially white people, why people rioted, looted and set fire to their own community, leaving thousands homeless, vital businesses destroyed and the neighborhood in a state of ruin from which it has yet to recover, more than fifty years later.

I had an epiphany of sorts several years ago when I read in its entirety, Dr. King's most famous speech. Here I'm quoting myself:

As I became re-acquainted last week with the "I Have a Dream" speech, one line particularly spoke out to me. Dr. King said early in the speech:

"One hundred years later...", (after the Emancipation Proclamation), "...the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land."

Perhaps for the first time in my life I put myself in the shoes of the people in the African American community who rioted in cities all over the country after King's murder. No longer do I feel that the violence, regrettable as it was, was not justified. With the image of people exiled in their own land in mind, I could understand why folks threw up their hands believing that this country had nothing left to offer (them). Martin Luther King preached non-violence in order to bring about justice for his people, and where did it get him? Dr. King did nothing more than confirm the rights guaranteed in our constitution. The only difference was he added the "for all" part that American children recite in school every day, preceded by the words liberty and justice. For that he went to jail in Birmingham. For that bricks were thrown at him in Chicago. For that he was killed in Memphis.

While many white folks claimed Dr. King who advocated non-violence would have been appalled by the response to his murder, King shortly before his death prophetically revealed the truth of the matter:

Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena... They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking.

During the sixties, roughly 40,000 white people left West Garfield Park, replaced by the same number of black people. With its commercial heart all but destroyed by the riots after the assassination of Dr. King, black people who had the means to do so, left the neighborhood as well. Between 1970 and 1980, the total population of West Garfield Park diminished by thirty percent. In the following decade, it diminished by nearly another thirty percent. In the latest census, the population is nearly thirty percent less than that. 

Here is a link to an article from WBEZ Chicago which describes the latest newsworthy event that took place around Madison and Pulaski, and it wasn't good. Once again, the neighborhood experienced riots and looting, this time after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. The article begins by quoting Thomas Morris, a lifelong resident of West Garfield Park who participated in the 1968 riots. Like Dr. King, Morris was measured in his response, viewing both sides of the issue: 

I’m looking at the consequences of being stupid. You torched stuff in the community that you [need]. Now, you got no place to buy food, medical [supplies], because you destroyed it... And you dishonored the man who lost his life.  

On the other hand... 

It seems like for us to get any attention, we have to do wrong...it's just systemic racism in America...and this has to change and we have to do things to be fair.

The article points out that Morris is "frustrated and angry with the damage" but also angry that people in 2020 still have to:

...protest and fight for the same things (we) fought for in the 60s... how the hell can the racism in the 60s be allowed today in the 2000s?

I'll let these words of Mr. Morris that cut to the chase better than my poor words ever could, close this post. 

This was long and as I stated at the top, it's only part one.

As I said, this is a complicated issue. 

Until next time...