I grew up less than a mile away from Chicago’s infamous Cabrini Green housing project. I lived on the seventeenth floor of a high-rise building. In my building, there were doormen who knew my name and gave me candy on Halloween. There were beautiful flower arrangements in the lobby that corresponded with the seasons and holidays. Guests were announced over a private intercom in each apartment.
In my neighborhood, we walked everywhere- to Lincoln Park, to Sandburg Supermarket, to Oak Street Beach. However we were strictly warned never, ever, to walk west of Lasalle Street. That was much too dangerous. The safety of my street ended four blocks west of my front door.
As an adult, I lived in an apartment less than one mile from Cabrini Green for fourteen years. This proximity meant that I would drive through it everyday on my way to work. What I saw, during those years, was the poverty and violence caused by foolish civil planning based on the idea that a densely populated high-rise housing project was a good design.
There were false starts to Cabrini Green’s demise. It began shrinking in 1995 but then progress slowed and the project seemed frozen for more than a decade. In 2008, the city finally began an aggressive move to tear down the largest remaining buildings. It was then I knew I had to make some memento of this mysterious place that existed in my backyard. Would I remember it when it was replaced by condos and town homes?
One early morning with my husband watching over me, I ventured into the demolition site. We walked into an inner courtyard surrounded by two buildings in process of being demolished and one that was still inhabited. Once we were in the courtyard, all of my perceptions about Cabrini Green changed. It was too early for the crews to have started the bulldozers parked around the site. It was quiet. I saw a child come out of the active building, cross a playground and head for the school located in the courtyard. I looked up and saw his mother watching him from her window ensuring his safe arrival to school. Being inside of the courtyard I could see what I had not been able to all the times I had driven past it. This was someone’s concept of a utopia. In a different time, someone had thought that this design would promote a sense of community. That it would cause its residents to rely on each other to exist and to strive for a better life. This is not what happened, but standing there, in a place only 4 blocks from where I had lived my entire life but as alien to me as the surface of the moon, I could finally see the sense behind these failed plans.
As the concrete and rebar crumbled under the wrecking ball, colorful, cheerful interior walls were revealed. Splashes of hot pink, deep purple, sunshine yellow and cobalt blue were visible. Inside that depressing monolithic exterior were rooms filled with life. They were a reminder that within Cabrini Green, one of the most dangerous housing projects ever to exist, were people.
As the wrecking ball carved out the south-west corner of this Division street high rise, colorful rooms were revealed to the traffic exiting the Kennedy Expressway.
The cheerfully painted rooms of Cabrini Green pushed through the construction dust and smoke and gave the City of Chicago one last mysterious piece of information about the infamous housing project. It was clear the moment these rooms were revealed that the interior apartments had not exclusively been occupied by gang members and drug addicts, but rather by families and children who were leading normal lives.
The western most building in the Cabrini Green housing project was located on Halsted Street between Division and Green Street. The inhabitants of the Halsted building watched, from their windows, as the only other remaining building, the only other thing left of their community, was demolished. In the distance, the John Hancock Building, the Bloomingdale’s Building, and the stylish buildings of the Gold Coast stand by foreshadowing the inevitable future of the Cabrini Green area.
Looking at the Larrabee High-Rise from the west, the Chicago skyline is bleached out by the construction dust. As I stood next to this building making this photograph it seemed to me that the clouds and the dust were forcing the city to pay attention to this historic change being made to the Chicago landscape.