Free Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz Page B

toward what used to be the Robert Taylor Homes, the complex where Reed grew up. It is now a vast tract of open land. Reed refers to it simply as “what was.”
    This is a city in motion, a place of passages. Chicago’s public-housing high-rises have long stood as cinderblock monuments to our disregard—some might say outright hostility—toward the poor. When the bulk of the high-rises were built, in the 1950s and 1960s, white aldermen didn’t want them in their neighborhoods, and so they were placed at the edge of already existing ghettos; because real estate was in short supply, they reached upward to the heavens. As a result, public housing served as a bulwark to segregation: For decades, these buildings have symbolized America’s disdain for its less fortunate.
    But there’s been a remarkable turn of events in the city that Nelson Algren once described as so audacious that it dared to “roll boulevards down out of pig-wallows and roll its dark river uphill.” If promises are kept and plans met, all of Chicago’s eighty-two public-housing family high-rises will be gone by 2010, having fallen to the wrecking ball. Erase the slate and start anew. It’s the equivalent of tearing down a city with the population of Des Moines; at its peak in the early 1990s, the Chicago Housing Authority housed two hundred thousand people. Plans are in place to build new homes in their stead, some of which will be allotted for those displaced, others selling, at least in one gentrifying community, for upwards of four hundred thousand dollars. This redevelopment strategy is presented as a grand gesture to right past wrongs: to build mixed-income communities, to integrate, if not by race, at least by class.
    It’s also a classic instance of Chicago’s daring and incautious nature. On the one hand, these mixed-income communities may well be like phoenixes rising from the ashes, a far more palatable alternative to the ghettos they have replaced. On the other hand, it is unclear what will happen to the thousands of poor families who once lived in these housing complexes, and for whom there’s not room in the newly constructed homes. In 1963, when Mayor Richard J. Daley declared, “There are no ghettos in Chicago,” most knew better: When you drove into the city from the south, you were faced with the two-mile-long curtain of high-rises; the squalor was impossible to ignore. Now, many of Chicago’s poor families are being scattered to the winds, finding their way outward to the city’s rim of equally troubled neighborhoods and to a ring of already struggling suburbs; this movement mirrors what has happened in European cities, such as Paris, where the poor, like a wreath, encircle the urban centers. For most, they will be no better off, and now completely out of sight, an urban problem that has been exported and dispensed with rather than resolved.
    You might think that the demolition of the projects is bad news for Reed, but, in fact, he’s busier than ever. His patrons are calling on him to replicate the landscapes, the Jesus Christs, and the tombstones in their new residences. But many are also asking for something simpler: a visual memento of the place they used to live. Despite the hellishness of these high-rises, for many they were home.
    After the parade, Reed and I walk back to his apartment in a Dearborn Homes mid-rise which, unlike the surrounding high-rises, will undergo renovation rather than demolition. Reed’s living room is sparsely furnished with a sofa and an easy chair, both covered in plastic sheeting. On the floor is a recently purchased carton of Newports and a case of Miller beer, as well as his television. He lifts the TV and feels underneath for some cash he’s hidden there; he’s going shopping for more paint and an easel. On one wall, I see three nearly identical sketches of a cluster of high-rises; each one is titled simply “Robert