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CHICAGO NEIGHBORHOODS AND SUBURBS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................viiCONTRIBUTORS...............................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION. CHICAGO NEIGHBORHOODS: BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE REGION, Ann Durkin Keating.....................1NOTE ON FURTHER READINGS...................................................................................15Chicago's Community Areas..................................................................................17Economic Origins of Metropolitan Chicago's Communities.....................................................18-19Land Subdivision and Urbanization on Chicago's Northwest Side..............................................20-21Chicago-Area Expressways in 2003...........................................................................21Neighborhood Change: Prairie Avenue, 1853-2003.............................................................22-23Chicago's Evolving Economic Geography......................................................................24Changing Origins of Metropolitan Chicago's Foreign-Born Population.........................................25Annexations and Additions to the City of Chicago...........................................................26Chicago's Railroad Patterns in 1950........................................................................27SUBURBS AND CITIES AS DUAL METROPOLIS Michael H. Ebner....................................................29MULTICENTERED CHICAGO Henry C. Binford....................................................................41CONTESTED SPACES Janice L. Reiff..........................................................................55ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY Susan E. Hirsch........................................................................64BUILT ENVIRONMENT OF THE CHICAGO REGION Robert Bruegmann..................................................76A-Z ENTRIES................................................................................................89ILLUSTRATION CREDITS.......................................................................................315INDEX......................................................................................................319

Chapter One

Chicagoans inhabit a dual metropolis, experiencing daily reminders of decay and glitter, despair and aspiration. As of 2000, the region encompassed 293 municipalities (263 in Illinois) spread over 4,401 square miles in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry, and Will Counties, plus the northwestern Indiana counties of Lake and Porter. What sociologists refer to as spatial mismatch is among the region's dominant and most entrenched characteristics: technologically oriented job opportunities requiring high skill levels, mostly concentrated along suburban corridors; poorly educated, underemployed labor pools, more often than not in the most socially isolated locales within central cities; and disparities in transportation networks, inhibiting opportunities for links between residence and work. The poorest residents of inner cities, contentiously labeled an "underclass," suffer disproportionately from the compound effects of their environs as one affliction builds upon another.

The contemporary metropolis-for all its stark residential and occupational contrasts-reflects national political structures and an economic system that too often proves disdainful of the inner city, its depleted resources, and its most beleaguered inhabitants. A quandary with deep historical roots, the mismatch intensified during the 1980s. Historian Richard C. Wade foresaw as early as 1982 that the Reagan administration's policy-an artifice with the positivist label "new federalism"-would deepen imbalances between tax-rich municipalities and their poorest neighbors. Between 1980 and 1990 federal spending on cities diminished from 15 to 6 percent of the national budget; in 1991 the nation's central cities were home to 43 percent of Americans below the poverty line, up from 27 percent in 1959. In 1989 the ratio of median family incomes between metropolitan Chicago's richest and poorest communities was nine to one; in 1960 it had been roughly five to one. The United States Conference of Mayors itemized the accumulating urban afflictions in 1986: population loss, impoverishment, racial concentration, deindustrialization, unemployment, homelessness, crime, poor schooling, and high taxes. European urban experts visiting American cities expressed puzzlement upon encountering conditions comparable to those in the third world.

Historian Kenneth T. Jackson has argued that a single process-population deconcentration-has shaped American metropolitan areas during the twentieth century. (The category of suburban is avoided, wherever possible, because it confuses as much as it explains.) While this process was already evident in the nineteenth century, when American demographic patterns were established, it accelerated in the final third of the twentieth century.

Two fateful statistical benchmarks reached in 1990-both widely reported and assessed-underscored the consequences of sustained deconcentration. First, Chicago's total population fell below 3 million for the first time since 1920; between 1970 and 1990, the city lost 17 percent of its population as its collar-county suburbs advanced 24 percent. Second, the percentage of Chicago workers employed in the private sector dropped to slightly under 40 percent for the first time; it had been 56 percent in 1972. In 1992 Sears, Roebuck attracted attention when it moved its corporate headquarters, and five thousand employees, from the downtown Sears Tower to a newly constructed, horizontally organized 1.9-million-square-foot facility (as of 2002 expanded to 2.4 million square feet) in the northwestern suburb of Hoffman Estates.

Embodying the bleakest circumstances of the dual metropolis is Census Tract #3805 on Chicago's South Side. Lying four miles south of the Loop, the area included the Chicago Housing Authority's Robert Taylor Homes. Constructed between 1960 and 1962, this complex comprised 28 identical high-rise buildings, each 16 stories, with a total of 4,415 apartment units. Demolition of the Taylor Homes, and Stateway Gardens to the north, commenced in 1997, part of the CHA's self-proclaimed Plan for Transformation ("a blueprint for positive change ... that will reinvent public housing"). Their construction too had been part of a wider public policy. The second wave of the Great Migration increased Chicago's black population from 277,731 to 1,102,620 between 1940 and 1970. Only 8 percent of the city's population in 1940, black Chicago constituted one-third of the city by 1970. The public housing high-rises were intended to contain this increasing black population within existing ghettos. The physical isolation of this CHA site was exacerbated by the completion in 1962 of the Dan Ryan Expressway immediately to its west; residents were effectively sealed off from jobs, facilities, and the white residents on the other side of the 10-lane highway. The census of 1990 documented the grim statistics of hyperpauperization: 100 percent of the census tract's 2,169 residents were African American; 89 percent lived below the poverty line, as contrasted with 64 percent of the...