American Pharaoh (33 page)

Daley’s decision to build his first projects as high-rise towers in the ghetto underscored another advantage of public housing:
it gave him power to control the demographics of the city. In the post–Elizabeth Wood era, there were no limitations on using
public housing to maintain the city’s racial separation. High-rises were an effective mechanism for keeping blacks, who were
threatening to outgrow the Black Belt, inside the borders of the existing ghetto. That helped solve two of the machine’s pressing
political objectives. It protected the white ethnic neighborhoods from an influx of black residents, and it locked black voters
into the traditional black wards where the submachine could keep them voting the straight machine ticket. High-rises were
an especially convenient way for the machine to house its black voters. Residents of the projects were easily available to
precinct captains, who could reap hundreds of votes simply working their way down a single elevator bank. It was easier than
pounding the pavement and knocking on tenement doors. Public housing also gave the machine an extra level of control over
residents: precinct captains often convinced them that they owed their apartments to the machine, and that they would lose
them — or, at the least, never get them repaired — if they failed to vote for the machine slate on election day.

In later years, Daley’s defenders would argue that the social cost of building public housing as dense high-rises was unknown
at the time. Even progressives such as Elizabeth Wood, they claimed, championed high-rises, modeled on the work of the Swiss-born
architect LeCorbusier, who advocated tall buildings spread out on large plots of land, to give urban developments the feel
of a suburb. “People in the CHA, including Elizabeth Wood, got into a love match with LeCorbusier — vertical neighborhoods
in the sky, green space all around,” says Edward Marciniak. Wood did believe in building housing projects that were substantial
enough that they would not become “islands in a wilderness of slums beaten down by smoke, noise, and fumes.” But Wood and
her fellow progressives never favored the kind of enormous housing projects that emerged in the Daley years — densely concentrated
towers that looked as if they were designed for the purpose of warehousing human beings. Most of her projects were low-rises,
like Jane Addams Homes, thirty-two buildings that were mostly three or four stories tall. Even later projects remained relatively
low to the ground, like Dearborn Homes, a collection of six-to nine-story buildings. “What Elizabeth wanted was small, well-built
complexes where people would feel a sense of community,” says James Fuerst, her director of research at the CHA.
⁵

The truth was, Daley had received many advance warnings that building projects like Robert Taylor were socially destructive.
Housing experts had been talking for years about the danger of concentrating poor people in densely populated public housing
projects. In 1949, at a conference organized by the
Chicago Defender
’s Public Service Bureau and attended by CHA board chairman Robert Taylor, the issue was confronted directly. “A public housing
project which takes over or dominates a whole residential area . . . has the possibility of being segregated on two counts:
(1) on a racial basis, and (2) on a low income basis,” South Side Planning Board director Wil-ford Winholtz warned. “Either
basis of segregation can be as bad as the other.”
⁶
Samuel Freifeld of the Chicago chapter of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith advised a year later that “[i]nter-racial
housing is brotherhood spelled out in terms of bricks, mortar and people living together as neighbors in a community.” And
in 1954, Elizabeth Wood delivered a similar message in her final address before being pushed out at the CHA. Two years later,
the Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago’s Advisory Committee to the CHA also issued a direct warning about concentrating
public housing in the “Negro ghetto.” Many of these warnings were made to Daley and his housing staff directly. When Daley
presented his first plans for public housing, Ferd Kramer, a prominent developer, predicted that the “most obvious effect”
of the proposed sites was “to create further concentrations of high density . . . segregated housing on the Central South
Side.” In a letter to one of Daley’s housing aides, Kramer wrote that “We hope you will work for a program scattering small
public housing developments throughout the city, instead of great colonies of racially, socially, and politically segregated
housing.”
⁷

Daley said at the time that he was aware of the serious problems with high-rise public housing, but he insisted that he had
no real alternative. The fault, he argued, lay with federal caps on construction costs. Local housing authorities were prohibited
from spending more than $17,500 per unit, and the CHA’s cost estimates for low-rise housing came it at $22,000 per apartment.
Daley went to Washington to testify for more generous spending guidelines, telling the Senate Housing Subcommittee that Chicago
“cannot put up four-bedroom units for $17,500” except in high-rise towers. The trouble with Daley’s argument was that at that
very moment, architect Bertrand Goldberg and developer Arthur Rubloff were building a complex of three-bedroom row houses
on the South Side that sold for $12,900 each, including the cost of the land and the developer’s profit. Their design won
the 1959 award for excellence from the American Institute of Architects and the Association of Commerce and Industry.
⁸

There were, to be sure, extra costs associated with public housing. The Public Housing Administration required that buildings
be constructed to last fifty years, and it insisted that even one-story garages have caisson foundations. But many of the
forces pushing the CHA’s building costs up were of more dubious origins. Robert Taylor cost 22 percent more than comparable
construction in New York, the most expensive housing market in the nation. The federal government suspected the CHA was involved
in some kind of impropriety. “Perhaps the strongest reason that Chicago does not get good prices is that it does not get strong
competition in bidding,” said the Public Housing Authority’s regional director. Another factor inflating the cost of public
housing in Chicago was the city’s policy of keeping it segregated. Daley would build new projects only in the existing black
neighborhoods, and land costs there were high because of the shortage of available sites and the need to clear the land of
occupants and businesses. As much as $2,000 of the cost of each public housing unit went to land cost, far more than in most
cities.
⁹

The Robert Taylor project was notable not only for its massive size and troubling design, but also for where Daley had decided
to locate it: the State Street Corridor. The twenty-eight high-rise towers that made up the project lay directly south of
three other large public projects that already lined State Street — the 797-unit Harold Ickes Homes, the 800-unit Dearborn
Homes, and the 1,684-unit Stateway Gardens. Adding Robert Taylor extended this long strip of public housing along State Street
by another two miles, and more than doubled the number of public housing units in it. It was the densest concentration of
public housing in the nation.

On June 4, less than a month after the City Council approved Robert Taylor, Daley announced a dramatic new addition to the
State Street Corridor: the Dan Ryan Expressway. The new highway was to be part of an elaborate network of superhighways radiating
out of the Loop. Illinois politicians had dreamed for years of building this kind of highway system, but it was only in the
mid-1950s, with the advent of programs like the $25 billion Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, that the dream started to become
a reality. Work on the east-west Congress Expressway (later the Eisenhower) had started shortly before Daley took office.
But he was the driving force behind the highways that followed: the Northwest (later renamed the Kennedy), the Southwest (later
called the Stevenson), and the Dan Ryan. The Dan Ryan Expressway — named for the president of the Cook County board, who was
a champion of the highway system — was intended to serve as a south route out of the Loop. The original plans for the Dan
Ryan called for it to cross the Chicago River almost directly north of Lowe Avenue, Daley’s own street, and then to jag east
several blocks, at which point it would turn again and proceed south. But when the final plans were announced, the Dan Ryan
had been “realigned” several blocks eastward so it would instead head south along Wentworth Avenue. It was a less direct route,
and it required the road to make two sharp curves in a short space, but the new route turned the Dan Ryan into a classic racial
barrier between the black and white South Sides.
¹⁰

In its new location, the Dan Ryan reinforced the South Side’s oldest racial dividing line. Wentworth Avenue was the boundary
that Daley’s Hamburg Athletic Club had defended in his youth and that Langston Hughes had been beaten up for crossing. Although
Wentworth Avenue was a well-established dividing line, it was not necessarily a stable one. The population of the old Black
Belt was growing rapidly, and Daley was adding to that growth by locating public housing for tens of thousands of additional
poor blacks along State Street. Residents of neighborhoods like Bridgeport worried that the black population explosion just
blocks away would push the ghetto past Wentworth Avenue and into their midst. Just when the construction of Robert Taylor
Homes made those fears seem justified, the city announced plans to reinforce Wentworth Avenue with the Dan Ryan. It was to
be one of the widest highways in the world, with a “dual-dual” design consisting of seven lanes in each direction, four high-speed
through traffic and three slower-moving lanes. It was the most formidable impediment short of an actual wall that the city
could have built to separate the white South Side from the Black Belt.
¹¹

Years later, sociologists studying long-term unemployment and welfare dependence among blacks on the South Side would conclude
that a large part of the problem was “spatial mismatch”— that these would-be workers simply were not located in physical proximity
to jobs.
¹²
But the distance between the Black Belt and the world of work in downtown Chicago was psychological as well as physical.
Researchers who interviewed South Side blacks who grew up in places like the State Street Corridor would find that a strikingly
large percentage of them had never been to the Loop, and many had never journeyed outside their own neighborhoods. The result
was that public housing projects like the Robert Taylor Homes served, in the words of one longtime tenant, as a “public aid
penitentiary.”
¹³
That social pathology would follow was all but inevitable. “Concentrating poverty concentrates things that correlate with
poverty,” notes sociologist Douglas Massey. “People adapt to a hostile and violent environment by becoming hostile and violent.”
¹⁴

Once in City Hall, Daley began to come through for one of his biggest supporters: organized crime. In June 1956, he disbanded
the Chicago Police Department intelligence unit known as “Scotland Yard.” A favorite of Mayor Kennelly’s, it had spent several
years bugging, infiltrating, and otherwise investigating the syndicate. “It was staffed with some of the best and most honest
policemen in the history of Chicago,” says an FBI senior agent. Scotland Yard’s chief investigator reportedly had five filing
cabinets of intelligence on six hundred syndicate leaders and thousands of lower-level mobsters. Police commissioner Timothy
O’Connor gave little explanation when he ordered Scotland Yard to cease operations and padlocked its offices. Chicago Crime
Commission director Virgil Peterson declared afterward that “the police department is back where it was ten years ago as far
as hoodlums are concerned.” The syndicate toasted the good news. “Chicago hoodlums and their pals celebrated around a champagne
fountain at the plush River Forest home of Mobster Tony Accardo,”
Time
magazine reported at the time. “The Accardo soiree, an annual affair, had a different spirit this year. Where once his guests
had slipped their black limousines into a hidden parking lot on the Accardo property, they now made an open show of their
attendance, and the Big Boss’s gardens rang with fresh and ominous joy. Inevitably, the bookie joints unfurled in the Chicago
Loop last week like so many Fourth of July flags, .... [and] raked in a take every dollar as good as the rackets produced
in Capone’s heyday. All this confirmed the Crime Commission’s long-held fear that the town would be opened up shortly after
last year’s election.”
¹⁵

Daley never explained the closing of Scotland Yard. But the syndicate was a member of the Democratic machine, controlling
the heavily Italian 1st Ward, which contained much of downtown Chicago, including the Loop. The syndicate also had considerable
influence in the 28th Ward on the West Side. The 1st Ward’s alderman and ward committeeman, John D’Arco, was a well-known
front man for Accardo and Sam Giancana. And many of the 1st Ward Democratic Organization’s patronage jobs went to notorious
Mafia foot soldiers. “Mad” Sam DeStefano, a syndicate “juice man,” had a 1st Ward no-show job with the Department of Streets
and Sanitation. “No one who knew him could ever imagine Sam sweeping the sidewalks or shoveling snow, but they paid him handsomely
for it,” says an FBI senior agent. The 1st Ward Democratic Organization had less need for the golf outings and fund-raising
luncheons that kept other ward organizations operating. It used mob pressure to collect an estimated $3,000 a month from each
of the bars and strip clubs along South State Street.
¹⁶