One Chicago neighborhood juts north of Howard Street like a defiant fist at the city`s extreme northeast edge.
Its poverty and crime, particularly manifested in unemployment, gang activity and drug trafficking, have long defied the efforts of social agencies and police.
A monotony of despair always threatens these dozen square blocks of East Rogers Park, an area sometimes referred to as ”North of Howard” by social workers or ”the jungle” by police.
The neighborhood suffers from a 75 percent unemployment rate and a 70 percent high school dropout rate, according to census data. Seventy-five percent of the homes are headed by a single parent and the average household income is $14,000 a year, barely above the poverty level.
The area`s boundaries are Howard Street on the south, Sheridan Road on the east and Chicago Transit Authority rapid transit tracks to the west. Stretching along its northern border, as an eerie symbol of escape, is Calvary Cemetery.
But scattered among the gutted residential buildings and vacant storefronts are a few seeds of hope. Among them are the Jonquil Hotel; three cooperative housing buildings; and a complex that houses a church, a school and a soup kitchen.
All are working to help people escape from homelessness and unemployment, and all are run by a group of interdominational Christian ministries that evolved from an umbrella group called Good News North of Howard.
One of those ministries, Good News Partners, was founded more than a decade ago by Rev. Arthur ”Bud” Ogle, a Presbyterian minister who was a campus pastor at Northwestern University in the 1970s.
As his students debated issues of poverty, Ogle said he would tell them:
”You know, Jesus didn`t really spend much time with young upwardly mobile professionals.”
So to better understand poverty, they decided to spend time with poor people. Armed with that commitment, naivete and volleyball equipment, the group traveled from their suburban Evanston campus to the Chicago neighborhood they had heard described in police reports.
Within a few months, they borrowed money to open a drop-in recreation center for kids.
”There was a shooting almost every month in the area, and we soon had bullets through the front window,” Ogle said. ”We expected things to be bad, but not that bad.”
Rather than run away, they started a small shelter for the homeless.
Buoyed by one friend`s promise of $5,000 from her imminent divorce settlement and another`s pledge to volunteer his plumbing skills, the group got a bank loan to purchase a fire-gutted building at 1600 W. Jonquil Ter.
”Well, the woman never got the money and the guy, while having good intentions, was not a plumber,” Ogle said. ”We`d probably never have taken that first step if we knew where we were headed.”
The hotel offers 60 low-rent ”transitional” apartments and jobs such as a switchboard operator and a maintenance worker. The hotel is usually filled. ”We don`t have a waiting list because homeless people can`t wait,” said Jane Prescott, director of development for Good News Partners.
Nearby are Bosworth House, Hope House and Phoenix House, three co-op buildings with a total of 28 units for low-income home buyers. And, at 7649 N. Paulina St., is Good News Community Church/Iglesia Buenos Nuevos, which is affiliated with the United Church of Christ.
Adjacent to the storefront chapel are the church`s soup kitchen and a kindergarten through 8th grade school that co-pastor, Rev. Robert Tschannen-Moran, calls ”a private Christian school for poor kids.” Sixty-five pupils are enrolled there.
Several years ago, Ogle and his wife, Donna, moved from Evanston into Phoenix House, revived from a burned-out hull. She is a faculty chairman at National-Louis University in Evanston and he is a parish associate at Winnetka Presbyterian Church.
Other members of the church have also become involved, regularly providing food to the needy and volunteering for projects ranging from repair work to tutoring.
Prescott, who is a member of the church, quit her job as an executive with a major corporation last year to work for Good News at one-third of her previous salary.
The Good News program has many success stories, including the homeless family that moved into the hotel, where the husband worked as maintenance man, and then transferred to a co-op after he got a maintenance job in a North Shore school.
There also have been failures, such as the woman who was reunited with her children after going through detoxification, only to lose custody of them again after she returned to cocaine use.
Last week, a group of teenagers and adults from a Blacksburg, Va., Presbyterian church, where Ogle recently preached, drove to Chicago to help paint and repair buildings and tutor.
The teens voted to come to Chicago rather than vacation at a mountain retreat or at a beach on the Atlantic.
One of them, Rachel Dillard, a drama student at the University of Michigan, has taken a year off to help conduct a theater workshop for neighborhood children at the Jonquil Hotel. They will perform a Bible-story play July 28 at Northwestern`s Alice Millar Chapel.
Ogle said the group appreciates the out-of-towners` efforts.
”This visit will help people in our neighborhood,” said Ogle. ”They can say, `If someone will come all the way from Virginia, I must be worth something.` ”
