Tommy Smitty, who wrecks buildings for a living, sat in his demolition truck outside the yellow-brick apartment house at the corner of Adams Street and Homan Avenue. He maneuvered his wrecking hook toward the building`s cornice, where it hung for a moment under the noon sun.
On his first swing, Smitty punched into the building`s northeast corner, and the crash of bricks echoed like a thunderstorm. The racket made the neighborhood dogs howl. A cloud of dust rose from the rubble and blanketed the neighborhood with a sad, gray haze.
”That building ain`t no service to us now,” said Sylvester Ratliff, one of about a dozen neighbors who had come out on their porches to watch the 29- unit dwelling come down.
”That building is a tragedy.”
In its final years, the 84-year-old structure was a metaphor for many of urban America`s ailments. It embodied what happens when a city`s worst traits conspire.
It changed from a source of neighborhood pride to a blighted, vacant shell, a victim of vandalism, fire, gangs, drugs and a confluence of apathy and fear.
The final blow came in January when a fire destroyed 14 of its apartments and forced the evacuation of all tenants. The fire was followed by brick thieves who moved in like locusts and, in the assessment of one District 11 police officer, ”just ate up” the entire north and west exterior walls.
In May, a judge ordered an emergency demolition.
The story of the building is the story of its block, where the recent demolition brought to four the number of vacant lots. And it is also the story of East Garfield Park, which, the last time somebody bothered to count, was scarred by 346 empty lots–and that was before the 1968 riots.
It is, in fact, a story of Chicago, where a variety of urban ills will combine this year to bring about the demolition of more than 1,000 buildings, according to John Hight, the city`s director of demolition. Last year`s total was 887.
Many of those buildings were replaced not with new ones but with litter, deserted cars, loiterers and a neighborhood`s broken dreams.
Raleigh Mathis, the acting director of the Department of Inspectional Services, must attach his signature to every demolition order issued by the city, an act he calls ”one of the most traumatic things” about his job.
Recently, as one of those orders was transforming forever the landscape at Adams Street and Homan Avenue, he reflected on a lost Chicago.
”About four months ago I drove through the South Side past four of the places I had lived in as a kid,” Mathis recalled. ”I discovered that every one of those areas is now a vacant lot. I had no idea I would have the reaction I had. It was like I had no roots.
”I remembered the gangways, the fences, the yards. I played on those roofs. I don`t mean to be so moody about it, but in that moment the problem became very real to me.”
When it opened in 1906, the building on the northwest corner of Adams and Homan was a handsome address. There were fireplaces in the apartments, brass doorplates and solid oak trim. The entrances, framed by stone archways, gave way to foyers with mosaics of green and terra cotta tiles. Delicately milled spindles guided tenants up the staircases that led to the second and third floors.
The details were the work of Luella and John Midgley, Chicagoans who constructed the apartment building on what was once undeveloped prairie. John, who was born in England, had been secretary to the general superintendent of the Illinois Central railroad and was regarded as one of the country`s foremost experts on transportation problems. Luella was the daughter of John Wheeler, builder of the first home in Chicago`s Irving Park area.
The decades leading up to World War II were prosperous ones for East Garfield Park. Though it had not become a residential community until the turn of the century, by 1920 it had swelled to a neighborhood of more than 56,000 residents, a population that grew by 7,000 over the next decade. Businesses flourished, thanks to good land values and low taxes.
”It was the finest area in the city of Chicago,” said Belle Holtzberg, who lived in a 2 1/2-room furnished apartment there as a newlywed in the 1930s. ”Duke Ellington played there, Little Jack`s restaurant had great cheesecake, and on holidays everyone would dress up and take walks–a sight like New York City on Easter Sunday. Once, my husband and I slept the night in Garfield Park. No one was afraid.”
Though more than half of the residential buildings in East Garfield Park had been constructed by 1895, the neighborhood`s housing stock continued to grow. By 1950, more than 21,000 homes had been built in the area. Italians, always a part of the neighborhood`s mix, became the predominant ethnic group. When some of the residents of East Garfield reflect on the start of its decline, they look to the 1950s, when the area`s black population, which had been less than 3 percent in 1930, grew to nearly 17 percent, bringing with it, they say, a decrease of city services and City Hall`s disregard for the neighborhood.
In 1959, when Mencie Richardson and her husband became the fourth black family to purchase a home on the 3400 block of Adams, several doors west of the yellow-brick apartment building, they had to alter a clause in the property`s title that prohibited blacks from buying. The Richardsons bought their 24-room brownstone, one of the most elegant homes in East Garfield Park, from a Jewish family that was moving out of the neighborhood.
”You put down that the City of Chicago ruined this neighborhood,”
Richardson said. ”They stopped enforcing the law out here, they stopped enforcing the building codes. They stopped caring about us altogether.”
Buildings that had been in the same families for years began to change hands rapidly as the racial mix changed, Richardson said. The apartment building on the corner changed hands five times from 1942 to 1963, when it was purchased by Seymour and Donald Cooper.
”The Cooper boys kept it good,” said Larry Mays, of Homan Avenue, who has lived across the street from the apartment building for 20 years. ”Maybe it wasn`t the Gold Coast, but it was a decent place that anyone would want to live in.”
Seymour Cooper said that when he and his brother bought the building, most of the tenants were Irish and blue collar and the building was in good shape. But shortly thereafter, Cooper said, things began to change.
”Many of the owners found that as a result of the transition taking place, they were unable to rent their apartments,” he said. ”When you find you have no demand for your apartments, you start looking perhaps at a lower echelon of society. The landlords stopped being particular. They let in families, be they black or white, that were undesirable. As a result of landlords letting anyone through the front door, the properties went down.”
By the time the Coopers sold the building in 1981, all of the tenants were black, as was 99 percent of East Garfield Park.
According to city records, the apartment building was cited frequently in the 1960s and `70s for violations described by one inspector as being of a
”serious nature” and a ”potential hazard.” The violations included inadequate heat, defective bathroom fixtures, and the presence of rats and roaches.
Eighty-year-old William Powell died of smoke inhalation in the building in 1969 during a fire in his third-floor flat. A 2-year-old tenant, Bonita Stubblefield, was treated by the Board of Health for lead poisoning in 1971. The first-floor apartment in which she lived was found to contain lead-bearing paint.
Leola Edmond, 73, does not remember precisely when she moved into Apartment 120, but guesses it was 20 years ago. She lived there with her husband, Prince Lee, until his death 13 years ago, then moved to a smaller apartment on the second floor. She stayed there until last summer with a grandson, now 31.
What Edmond describes of her two decades in the building is a story of heartbreaking decline. She finally fled the building last July after seeing her grandson stabbed with a butcher knife by another tenant outside her door. ”For a long time I loved my four little rooms,” said Edmond. ”Those four little rooms were my home. . . . But what I saw there took every last thing out of me. I haven`t been right since.”
Things became especially bad four years ago, neighbors said. Drugs were sold out of a first-floor apartment and gambling games were run in the hallways, they said.
”It was a supermarket in there,” said Darrin Howard, 20, who lives on Adams, kitty-corner from the lot where the building stood. ”Marijuana, cocaine, a little heroin.”
Larry Chewning, a schoolteacher who lives on Adams, across the street from the lot, and is a member of the area`s white population of 1 percent, sent a telegram to Mayor Harold Washington last year complaining that police had been unresponsive to neighborhood complaints about drug selling. A letter last year from the District 11 police commander claimed that a nine-day surveillance of the building last June produced ”no evidence of drug activity.”
”That was a damned lie,” Chewning said. ”Just a big, baldfaced lie. Everyone on the block could see what was going on.”
Officer George Parker, a member of District 11`s tactical team, said recently that he had participated in at least three gambling and five narcotics raids there in the last four or five years.
He said a tenant there was ”busted fairly frequently for drugs but then was back to business as usual.” Neighbors say the dealer is now operating out of a building one block south.
From the time the Coopers sold the building in 1981 until its demolition last month, it had three more owners.
”It wasn`t one of my better moves,” said one of them, Charles Wagner, who bought the building for $180,000 in January, 1982. Last June he sold it for $15,000 less.
Wagner blames the building`s decline on previous landlords who ”milked it until it made them wealthy men,” and on tenants who, he said, tore the building apart with ”malicious vandalism.” Cooper said he would make repairs to the building, only to have them undone by tenants.
”I don`t know how in the world people can live in those kind of surroundings,” Wagner said. ”It was too heartbreaking for me.”
On Jan. 29, as George Lane was looking out his second-floor window down the street on Adams, he saw flames shooting from the roof and out one of the windows of the building. The fire department responded with 90 firefighters and 17 pieces of equipment.
”Considerable damage,” the department`s report concluded. ”Cause undetermined.” But neighbors believe the fire was set by local gang members because the building`s drug dealer was cutting into their narcotics profits.
”That building was a messed-up thing,” said Sherwood James, a 29-year-old painter who lived there with his grandmother and uncle. ”There`s not another thing to say about it.”
Recently, on a warm Saturday night, Chewning, president of the block club, invited the residents of the 3400 block of Adams into his home. A flyer distributed by Mencie Richardson implored them to come ”make an important decision.”
The neighbors knew what would be asked of them. In 1979, the last time a building was leveled on the block, they raised $1,700 to place a cyclone fence around the lot. Chewning estimated that it would cost $2,000 to build a fence this time.
”Give as little as you can or as much as you can,” Chewning said. His neighbors–in a community where 43 percent of the residents live below the poverty level–pledged $1,221. Others offered their time for a fundraising cookout.
Ella Hamilton gave $50. ”If I can find a way to do a little better, Larry, I will,” she said.
Through Chewning`s front windows, the neighbors could see all that was left of the corner building–boards, broken bricks and shattered glass.
”That building was like anything else,” Tommy Smitty, the wrecker, had said the Sunday before. ”You lose the breathing inside of it, it can`t help but die.”
