American Pharaoh (37 page)

In February 1958, the University of Chicago unveiled an urban renewal plan that would change the face of one of Chicago’s
most prominent neighborhoods. Hyde Park was an independent township until it was absorbed by the city in 1889, a year before
the founding of the University of Chicago. The area underwent a surge of building in the 1890s, when ground was broken on
many of the university’s Gothic halls, and numerous elegant apartment buildings and single-family homes were constructed.
Before long, Hyde Park was home to some of the city’s finest examples of Chicago School architecture, and at least one world-famous
building: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School Frederick C. Robie House. The neighborhood’s character began to change in the
1940s when poor blacks began to move in. Many of the new arrivals were fleeing the overcrowded Black Belt, which was itself
being flooded by migrants from the South. Between 1940 and 1950, Hyde Park’s black population more than tripled.
⁴⁵
During the early 1950s, the black influx continued, and many whites began to move out. In 1956, the population of the greater
Hyde Park–Kenwood neighborhood was more than one-third black.
⁴⁶

By the late 1940s, University of Chicago administrators and some neighborhood residents worried openly that Hyde Park was
on its way to becoming a slum. In response, local residents formed the Hyde Park–Kenwood Community Conference in 1949. Three
years later, the University founded the South East Chicago Commission. Both organizations had the goal of preventing the area
from going into decline. The community conference supported the idea of an integrated community, but sought to preserve the
neighborhood’s “high standards.” The SECC was more concerned about maintaining a large white presence, and seeing that as
much of the black population as possible was middle class. The SECC’s stand was far from the first time the university allied
itself with attempts to keep blacks out of Hyde Park. In the 1930s and 1940s, the school had actively promoted the use of
restrictive covenants to keep houses in the neighborhood occupied by whites. When the
Chicago Defender
objected to the policy in 1937, university president Robert Maynard Hutchins responded that the covenants were legal and
that Hyde Park residents had the “right to invoke and defend them.” By 1957, that was no longer true, since the Supreme Court
had declared restrictive covenants unenforceable in 1948. The university’s new goal was, at least publicly, the more modest
one of neighborhood “conservation.” But in their private communications, top administrators were less circumspect. The high-income
housing the SECC was seeking to bring to Hyde Park was, Chancellor Kimpton declared, “an effective screening tool” and a way
of “cutting down [the] number of Negroes” living in the area.
⁴⁷

Daley’s support for Hyde Park urban renewal dated back to before he was mayor. After Daley got the Democratic nomination in
1955, Kimpton went to meet with him and sound him out on the question. Daley readily committed himself to helping the university
in its efforts to shore up Hyde Park. His support was, of course, in large part political. Daley, the rough-hewn son of Bridgeport,
was eager to ingratiate himself with the administrators, trustees, faculty, and alumni of the city’s premier educational institution.
In the 1955 general election, many of these university constituencies would back Daley’s opponent, Robert Merriam, who was
both Hyde Park’s alderman and the son of a University of Chicago professor. But in later years, Daley would win surprising
levels of support from the university community. Daley also supported Hyde Park renewal to bolster an important city institution.
University administrators were predicting disaster if they were not successful in defending the neighborhood. In fact, reports
were circulating that the university given the school’s enormous investment in its physical plant, but it was not a risk Daley
was prepared to take. A more likely prospect was that the university might go into decline as students and faculty were increasingly
put off by the neighborhood. Daley evaluated these concerns, of course, as a resident of Bridgeport, who himself lived only
blocks away from the rapidly expanding South Side ghetto.
⁴⁸

Hyde Park urban renewal was under way even before Daley became mayor, and it proceeded through a number of loosely coordinated
projects. But the capstone of the urban renewal effort was the University of Chicago’s Final Plan, released on February 1958.
The plan was the brainchild of Julian Levi, the executive director of the SECC and the university’s shrewd point man on urban
renewal. A lawyer and the son of a rabbi, Levi had grown up in Hyde Park and was considering relocating to the suburbs. It
was a remote possibility attended both college and law school at the University of Chicago. Levi was a tenacious advocate
for his cause, equal parts missionary and streetfighter. To an academic audience, he could make the intellectual case for
urban renewal. In meetings with opponents, he could scream and intimidate to get his way. And out in the community, he was
skilled at throwing around the university’s money to achieve his goals. Levi’s Final Plan, which covered a large stretch of
land between 47th Street and 59th Street, was a blueprint for reversing the social transformation that had occurred in Hyde
Park over the past two decades. It called for demolishing about 20 percent of the neighborhood’s buildings, spread out over
an 855-acre urban renewal area. In the name of removing “blight” and creating a “compatible neighborhood” for the university,
the plan proposed destroying almost twenty thousand homes in Hyde Park.
⁴⁹

Supporters of the neighborhood’s poorest residents mobilized in opposition. A focal point of the debate was how much public
housing to include in the urban renewal area. Liberals argued that the blight was dilapidated housing, not the poor people
who lived in it. Building public housing would upgrade the housing stock, while allowing current residents to remain in the
neighborhood. But the university was adamantly against public housing. Levi denounced it as “something harmful to the neighborhood
which the people did not want anyway.” One of the leading opponents of the university on this point was the Hyde Park chapter
of the NAACP. Members of the group denounced the urban renewal plan as segregationist, and called for significant amounts
of both public and middle-class housing to be added. They also demanded greater protections for the residents who would end
up losing their homes and having to relocate. The Hyde Park chapter began its campaign by lobbying local aldermen to work
for modifications in the Final Plan. It was at this point that the NAACP’s newly installed pro-machine administration stepped
in. On September 6, 1958, Theodore Jones — who had been elected president of the Chicago chapter a year earlier — ordered
the Hyde Park chapter and two other local units to close. Jones declared that they had been shut down because they acted “without
complete sanction of the parent branch” on a variety of issues, not because of differences over Hyde Park urban renewal. The
branch closings were bitterly opposed in Hyde Park, and by some members of the NAACP’s citywide board. Beatrice Hughes Steele,
treasurer of the Chicago chapter, called Jones’s action “a destruction of the grass-roots heart of the branch.” After the
closing of the Hyde Park chapter, black opposition to Hyde Park urban renewal was effectively quashed.
⁵⁰

The Catholic Archdiocese gave qualified support to opponents of the Final Plan. The Church did not dispute the need for urban
renewal, but it argued for the construction of at least some low-income housing in Hyde Park, and for greater assistance for
people whose homes would be destroyed. “I was not opposed to the plan as such,” one archdiocese official explained later.
“I wanted the University of Chicago to have protection, but I wanted the people to have protection, too. They couldn’t just
ride roughshod over 20,000 people.” The archdiocese also expressed concern that so much money would be poured into the area
surrounding the university — more than $30 million in federal and local urban renewal funds — that little would be left for
other Chicago neighborhoods. The Church’s stand in favor of the victims of urban renewal may have been motivated at least
in part by self-interest. Priests and parishioners in the working-class white neighborhoods surrounding Hyde Park were complaining
loudly that thousands of poor blacks pushed out by urban renewal might end up moving into their parishes. In this conflict
between the Church and the university, Daley, who attended Mass every day, had no problem siding with the university. Julian
Levi recalled discussing the archdiocese’s opposition to the Final Plan with the mayor. “He said, ‘I go to mass, but I accept
no intrusion on public responsibilities.’”

Daley pushed the university’s urban-renewal plan through the City Council, and secured the federal and local money needed
to implement it. Thousands of units of slum housing were razed in Hyde Park — the
New York Times
declared at the height of the project that the “areas near the university resemble German cities just after World War II.”
Throughout the neighborhood, substandard buildings and blight were replaced by new housing or open space. When urban renewal
was complete, the new Hyde Park that emerged was more attractive, more sparsley populated, wealthier, and whiter. From 1960
to 1970, the neighborhood’s population declined more than 26 percent. The people who were being pushed out of Hyde Park were
just the ones the university was concerned about: the poor, and blacks. During the 1960s, average income in the neighborhood
soared 70 percent, and the black population fell 40 percent.

Daley’s urban renewal plan gave the university the kind of neighborhood it wanted, but the transformation came at a cost.
The poor, black residents who had found their way to Hyde Park, one of the city’s few integrated neighborhoods, were once
again pushed back into the ghetto. No doubt many of them ended up, as historian Arnold Hirsch has suggested, in the new housing
projects that were going up along the State Street Corridor and elsewhere. Advocates for the poor had hoped that some of the
substandard buildings in Hyde Park would be replaced with public housing, so poor people could remain in the neighborhood,
but the university succeeded in blocking almost all of the proposed units. In the end only thirty-four public housing apartments
were built, and twenty-two of them were reserved for elderly tenants. Hyde Park urban renewal also erected racial barriers
between the neighborhood’s middle-class residents and the black neighborhoods surrounding it. Perhaps the starkest example
was the University Apartments, two extremely long mid-rises that stretched down the middle of 55th Street. The buildings,
which stand between the university campus and ghetto neighborhoods to the north, were designed as “barrier-type” buildings,
Alderman Despres observed, designed to separate racial groups.
⁵¹

On March 4, 1958, Daley presided at the dedication of newly restored City Council chambers, a little less than a year after
they had been damaged by fire. The following month, the City Council experienced a more substantive change. Alderman Tom Keane
ascended, with Daley’s backing, to chair the Finance Committee, the most powerful on the council. Keane was already Daley’s
floor leader, and the combination of the two posts made him the most influential alderman in Chicago history. Around the same
time, Daley was reelected to another two-year term as chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. In his acceptance
speech, Daley called the machine precinct captains “the strength of our party.” No one was more important in a Democracy,
Daley said, than “those who translate issues and problems for the electorate.”
⁵²

As his new term as party boss began, Daley was in the process of quietly eviscerating Dawson and the black submachine. Dawson
had been one of Daley’s most consistent supporters. He had backed Daley for party boss against the Wagner-Duffy faction, and
he had schemed with Daley to remove Kennelly from City Hall. At election time, Dawson had always delivered overwhelming majorities
for the machine slate. And Dawson had always given Daley cover on race, serving as the black face of the Democratic machine
and putting down civil rights uprisings in the black community. Daley’s objection to Dawson was not how he exercised power,
but how much power he had. As head of the black submachine, Dawson was in a unique position. Unlike other ward committeemen,
his influence extended into several wards, and these wards were of considerable importance to the machine. This meant that
if Dawson wanted to make things difficult for the machine, he could. Dawson had never given Daley trouble, but Daley had seen
how the wily black boss had helped to force Kennelly out of office. With the city’s black population soaring, Dawson’s power
was also rising. Ignoring Dawson’s years of personal loyalty, Daley decided to act before it was too late.