It`s about 5 o`clock in downtown Waukegan and the afternoon rush hour, such as it is now in this once-bustling city, is in full swing.
Lawyers, police officers and employees of various government agencies busily make their way to cars parked outside the Lake County Building and Courthouse. Others queue up for the bus ride home.
A few blocks away, the pace is much slower. The scores of street people who fill the empty hours by circling the area around the once-vibrant Genesee Street are making their final pass of the day, as the sun begins to sink behind tall buildings that 20 years ago whistled with activity.
But times have changed. Today, the sidewalk outside the state public aid office on Genesee is a popular area to mill about. Just as popular with those perennially down and out is a place a couple of doors north: the God`s Hand Extended Mercy Mission.
Callie Dupree is proprietor, provider and evangelical minister at this converted storefront in the poorest part of the city`s distressed downtown.
There are only a few businesses still operating on this stretch of south Genesee, which is dotted with crumbling buildings, some built early in the century and today showing few hints of their former magnificence, and vacant lots where long-empty eyesores have been torn down.
Dupree, a woman in her 50s who has lived in Waukegan for more than half her life, offers Waukegan`s unfortunate what she can: Help and hope, a place to wash up and exchange soiled clothing for something clean to wear and the chance to take in a little solid food.
”It`s a disgrace in Waukegan,” Dupree says, taking no satisfaction in her assessment. ”I go to the Valley and I never knew people lived so bad. I went down there and brought out a man who had been in an awful fight. Cleaned him up as best I could.”
Asked what the Valley was, Dupree at first declined to say, calling it
”just a name I give this place. Really, though, there are a few places around Waukegan that I call the Valley. It`s over here, there, and it`s a state of mind, if you understand what I`m saying. Some people just got caught up in a situation-liquor, now a lot of drugs too, and it`s getting worse down there.
”Down there in the ravines, where these men live without any clean clothes or blankets,” she added, giving away, perhaps intentionally, the location of the Valley.
”. . . We`ve got all these beautiful houses in Waukegan,” Dupree continued, alluding to neighborhoods in the northern part of the city that resemble those in affluent suburbs along the North Shore. ”And then we`ve got people over here sleeping in the bushes.”
Miles of ravines cut and wend through Waukegan, a city of more than 69,000 people that covers about 24 square miles.
In his classic novel ”Dandelion Wine,” science fiction writer and Waukegan native Ray Bradbury called the ravines of his boyhood in the late 1920s ”the very end of civilization.”
That description comes off as understatement today.
About the hobgoblins that haunt the mind of a 12-year-old, Bradbury wrote:
”Here and now, down in that pit of jungled blackness were suddenly all the things . . . without names (that) lived in the huddled tree shadow, in the odor of decay.”
Whether or not one can ever revisit the magical ravines of Bradbury`s Waukegan youth, where he proudly trampled along in brand-new sneakers gathering dandelions and picnicking on deviled-ham sandwiches, one needn`t go far to find Callie Dupree`s Valley.
On a recent day, just below a viaduct on Genesee Street, between the public aid building on one side of the street and the Waukegan Township general assistance office a little further south on the other, is a ravine where a small group of men were sleeping off the effects of too much booze-or the withdrawal of too little. Liquor bottles, discarded cigarette packs, empty bags of what appeared to be popcorn-the staples of such a lifestyle-were among debris scattered about.
Except for the occasional muffled thump-thump of vehicles hitting cracks in the pavement on the bridge overhead, all was quiet.
Each of the inhabitants of this encampment seemed to have his own way of adapting to the bumpy ground that was his bed. Some wrapped one or both legs around protruding tree roots in order not to fall further down the steep ravine while asleep. Others found a flat shelf in the terrain.
Mayor Haig Paravonian conceded that the situation in the Genesee-Belvidere Road area is bleak, and that the city has moved to ”tear down the liquor store where the people hang out with their half-pints.”
He said several other buildings in the area ”need action,” but that for the most part, ”We hope private organizations can pick up the ball and do the job that everybody waits for government to do.”
The God`s Hand mission consists of no more than a small front room with about a half dozen tables and chairs, and a makeshift stage that is outfitted with a microphone and two large loudspeakers that look to be much too powerful for the space. In the back is a small resale shop, where some of the money that keeps the mission running is made.
Dupree said she isn`t much of a fundraiser, relying instead on just a few sources: the Crossroad Church in Libertyville, which donates clothing; her husband; and ”other friends who give the mission clothing and occasionally finances.”
”I would like to have some pews here, someday,” says Dupree, shaking her head and adding in the next breath that she has taken in only $2 this day in donations and sales. Rent alone on the storefront exceeds $300 a month.
Dupree said she is pained by the vicious circle in which various churches and government and quasi-government agencies in the area expand their shelter services for the homeless during winter months, as she says, ”to keep them from freezing, then dump them on the streets in the summer to die.”
The answer, Dupree says, is ”to nurse these people back to health, get them off their $147 assistance check and into a job. . . . What good is providing assistance checks if all they`re going to do is go out and buy liquor with it?”
While saying she didn`t want to criticize the efforts of others, Dupree said some programs in the area merely take in homeless people for a number of weeks, clean them up and then release them back to the streets, where the old, bad ways are quickly resumed.
The problem, said Barbara Gordon, executive director of the Lake County Community Action Project, stems from the fact that ”we don`t have enough safe, affordable and sanitary housing in Waukegan.”
Gordon`s agency tries to address the needs of families long before their situation slides into the helplessness that Dupree encounters daily.
”With all the industry closings here over the last 10 or more years, we`ve seen so many people not only lose their jobs, but even their homes,”
Gordon said, adding that children represent the largest segment of the homeless in Lake County.
Jim Williams, director of the Family Service Agency of Northern Lake County, has been involved in social service work in the Waukegan area for more than 20 years.
”We`ve never before had the kinds of waiting lists for our services that we see now,” said Williams, whose agency, funded almost exclusively by the United Way, provides a range of family counseling services. ”We`re doing our best, but the fact is a lot of people out there will go without the help they need.”
