My office is located in a doomed public housing high-rise at the Stateway Gardens development on the South Side of Chicago. The building is scheduled to be closed on Sept. 30 and demolished by the end of the year. Every day residents are being moved out. The high-rises at Stateway, like many of the people who live in them, have street names: This building—3542-44 South State—is known as “The House of Pain.”
In the course of the week, I will be dealing with city officials and squatters, developers and drug dealers, police officers and gang members, reporters and addicts, academics and hustlers. Among others. Above all, I will try to be of practical use to community members going through forced relocation.
On Sunday afternoon, though, I went to the House of Pain not to work but to visit a friend. I was joined by my wife, Patsy Evans, a photographer who collaborates in the web publication we put out from Stateway—a sort of inner city samizdat—called The View From The Ground. (Patsy will contribute occasional photos to this diary.)
It was a beautiful day at the border of the seasons: summer warmth and autumn light. A group of young boys was playing baseball on the dusty grounds of the development. The score, they told us, was 91 to 53. They intended to play to 100.
In the open-air lobby of 3542-44—a space (and dimension of existence) residents call “up under the building”—the drug trade was brisk. As we passed through, I exchanged greetings with some of those working there. I am a familiar presence in their lives, and they are in mine.
We had come to Stateway to see Catherine “Coco” Means, who lives on the 10th floor of the House of Pain. I didn’t bother to check whether the elevator was working. It hasn’t worked for many months. This is now a matter of policy rather than dereliction (or perhaps dereliction as policy): The only time the elevators work is when a move is in progress. Then elevator crews operate them manually for the benefit of the movers.
Under the Chicago Housing Authority’s “Plan for Transformation,” all 53 high-rises in family developments across the city are to be demolished within the next few years—thus far, more than half have been razed—and the sites are to be redeveloped into “mixed income communities.” Four of the eight original Stateway buildings have been emptied and demolished. Now two of the remaining four, including 3542-44, are about to be closed. Residents are given the option of relocating to another building on site or taking a housing voucher and entering the private real estate market.
As we climbed the stairs, we moved through a gallery of text. Graffiti covers virtually every available surface. It’s a mixed bag: boy-girl stuff ranging from the sentimental to the carnal, gang tags, religious utterances, and everywhere names, names, names. My favorite item in this building is a love letter, alive with the breath of passion and longing, written on a brick wall on the seventh floor.
The view to the east from Coco’s porch is striking: a singular cityscape and beyond, the blue of Lake Michigan. Chicagoans, driving by, who glance at these high-rises—symbols of every urban ill—do not, I suspect, imagine the views many public housing residents enjoy. (I tried in a recent piece to evoke this: the city as seen from the perspective of public housing— from the inside looking out.)
I first got to know Coco last fall, when I wrote a View story about an incident in which the police kicked in her door and damaged her property in the course of searching her apartment. The broken door remains on her porch; it was replaced but never removed.
I find Coco delightful—clever, witty, surprising. She is also, by her own account, subject to depression and is “stuck.” She has two small children and is five months pregnant. She is the only remaining resident on the 10th floor; everyone else has moved out. For months, she struggled with the question of whether to stay at Stateway or take a housing voucher and move out. She finally decided on the latter course. She has found an apartment in a neighborhood to the south. The apartment is “beautiful,” she says, though the neighborhood is “raggedy.”
A few days ago, there was a fire outside her door. Flames shot out of the incinerator chute located between her apartment and the stairs. She doesn’t have a phone, and there are no alternative fire escape routes. Terrified, she finally got the attention of people on the street 10 floors below, and they contacted the fire department.
Coco was shaken by the fire. “We could’ve died,” she kept saying. “We could’ve died.” Now, she says, she is ready to leave Stateway. “It’s time to get away from these bricks.”
I’ll miss her. Last fall as Patsy and I were leaving her apartment, Coco said, “I look at people like you, and I think you must live the perfect life.”
We laughed and assured her that our lives were far from perfect.
“There’s a reverse to that,” Patsy observed later as we descended the stairs. “People look at Coco and assume she lives an absolutely wretched life.”
It’s easy to laugh at Coco’s sweet, wishful naiveté about other lives. Why is it so hard to recognize the equally naive, equally unrealistic view that fails to see that human nature is no less complex and mysterious when its home address is the innermost inner city?
See a slide show of photos taken at the Stateway Gardens housing development.
