Up from Little Hell From their inception in the early twentieth century, Chicago’s public housing projects invited controversy as entire neighborhoods were destroyed to pave the way for new homes for the poor. L AW R E N C E J . VA L E
Reprinted with permission from Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities by Lawrence J. Vale, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2013 University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
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n 1929 a treatise by sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh famously depicted Chicago’s Near North Side as divided into The Gold Coast and the Slum. Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing development, built in several stages between the early 1940s and the early 1960s, replaced that slum in a double sense. Initially, the projects served as a clean and modern alternative to the horrific conditions of the “Little Hell” slum; but subsequently, after a protracted period of decline, Cabrini-Green itself became as vilified as the slum it had been meant to cure. Some of the poor housing conditions that prompted slum clearance in mid-twentieth-century Chicago can be traced to an earlier calamity: the Great Fire of 1871. Although the fire burned less than one-fourth of the city’s built-up districts, including the downtown, it decimated the North Side east of the Chicago River. Much of pre-fire Chicago had suffered from shoddy construction and lax regulation; after the fire, debates raged over whether the right to rebuild private property should be tempered by consideration of a broader “public interest” to have a less risky city of masonry that would be more reassuring to future investors. Because the Great Fire had devastated thousands of worker-owned pine cottages that had served 18 | Chicago History | Fall 2014
as the basis for much of Chicago’s low-cost housing, sorting out how to rebuild the city forced engagement with the highly diversified financial circumstances of the populace. For working-class Chicagoans of limited means, the vagaries of the insurance industry, especially when coupled with the loss of their workplaces, meant that their only viable alternative entailed construction of a temporary wooden shanty on their property. By contrast, the city’s newly elected leadership pushed for “fire limits” within which new wooden structures would be prohibited. Working-class Chicagoans viewed the proposed restrictions as something imposed by a cadre of downtown property owners who, already once burned, wished to protect their investments by insisting that lowerincome people should not build “firetraps” anywhere else in the city. Moreover, as Karen Sawislak argues, some ethnic groups viewed the restrictions as designed by nativist proponents as a means to undermine their ability to rebuild as an ethnic enclave. Violent protesters disrupted a city council meeting in January 1872, largely fomented by immigrant groups seeking to protect the value of investment in their wooden homes and neighborhoods. A month later, the council passed a heavily compromised fire protection bill that stopped short of extending the restrictions citywide. In particular, the area east of the Chicago River, west of Clark Street, and north of Chicago Avenue—in short, the site of the future Little Hell slum—was one of the few burned areas to be left outside the fire limits. Within a year after the fire, the “Great Rebuilding”—much of it deploying inferior materials—