The 48th Ward is the city’s smallest; but it displays nearly the whole range of urban possibility. Running north from Lawrence Avenue for a mile and a half along the lakefront and inland to Clark Street, its Noah’s-Ark-like variety could serve as a bricks-and-mortar metaphor for all of Chicago.
The highest concentration of its 60,000 residents is in a great wall of high-rises that look out over the lake, each with a private beach like the great resort hotels of Miami and Honolulu. A constant roar of traffic along Sheridan Road effectively separates the inhabitants of those highrises from the rest of the ward. The El, which here runs on an embankment a few blocks to the west, also makes it difficult for the people of the 48th to cross from one neighborhood to another.
One of those inland neighborhoods, Lakewood-Balmoral, is a showcase of vintage homes, some of them gracious examples of Victorian and Prairie School architecture. Its tree-lined streets seem magically transported from a upscale North Shore suburb.
Running down the ward’s spine are blocks, some of which are wholly given over to apartment hotels built in the 1920s, when the area was a popular address for young couples just starting married life.
Some have been restored to their jazz-age grandeur to house this era’s young urban professionals. Others show the wear and tear of use as halfway houses that often became dumping grounds for mental patients, addicts and released convicts.
Clark Street, the busy shopping strip of the Andersonville neighborhood, was once solidly Swedish. Now it is a multiethnic kaleidoscope, and its storefront businesses always have been more than exercises in capitalism. Restaurants there serve as meeting grounds where neighbors gather over American or Turkish coffee, cinnamon rolls or baklava.
“Ninety percent of my customers are from the neighborhood,” said Debbie Tunney, the Irish-American owner of Ann Sather’s, a Swedish restaurant and a fixture of the community for decades.
Every Chicago community once had such a strip of local shops. But more and more concessions have been made to the automobile, scarring the neighborhoods with strip malls and giant stores separated from the sidewalks by dark moats of parking.
In 1994, Andersonville merchants were mailed a notice from the Illinois Department of Transportation announcing an “intersection improvement.”
“Every time I see the word `improvement’ in an official document, I get sick,” Mary Ann Smith said one recent morning. She was sitting in a back booth at Ann Sather’s downing an egg-white omelet slathered with salsa in preparation for yet another day of struggle with developers and government.
That letter from IDOT was followed by jackhammers breaking up the sidewalks at Clark and Foster Avenue, recalled Smith, the ward’s alderman. The department planned to speed the flow of traffic by creating turning lanes. Space for them would be taken from the walkways.
The endangered bits of pavement didn’t constitute much geography. Yet the story of those concrete slabs has become a parable in the 48th Ward. For concerned citizens, it illustrates the necessity to be on guard whenever outsiders show up offering to better their community.
Along the Clark Street strip of shops, many more customers arrive by foot than by car. A previous repair of Clark Street had kept customers away from businesses long enough that some stores went under.
An earlier widening of Bryn Mawr Avenue, four blocks north of Foster, killed the viable business street of the northern part
of the ward.
To urbanites, a sidewalk is more than a way to get from one place to another. It is the New World’s equivalent of the ancient Greek agora–a forum where neighbors on their daily rounds meet and pause to chat. That seemingly innocuous act is, in fact, the first ingredient in the recipe for grass-roots democracy.
Alarmed by the jackhammering of their sidewalk, Clark Street merchants contacted Smith, who called IDOT. The agency never returned her call. She then contacted Chicago’s equivalent of IDOT, which asked the state for a meeting; IDOT refused. Undaunted, Smith went over their heads.
She called U.S. Sen. Paul Simon and Rep. Sidney Yates and explained how chopping up a few slabs of concrete would endanger her community. The politicians persuaded IDOT to heed the voters’ concerns.
“Look at those school kids,” Smith said, pointing out a cluster of children waiting to cross Clark and Foster on their way to Trumbull School, a block to the west. “If the sidewalk had been narrowed, they wouldn’t have anywhere to stand. It would be dangerous.”
Having finished her eggs and salsa, Smith was conducting a walking tour of the ward she has represented for six years. She loves playing tour guide, pointing to the community’s victories, sharing her sorrow over its losses.
The triumph of the sidewalk, she said, came after 25 years of battles pitting the people of Andersonville, East Edgewater and Uptown against the bureaucrats and planners in Springfield and Washington. Though the ward’s human and housing-stock variety is what makes cities lovable–to those who love cities–that same diversity gives urban planners fits.
Who could plan for blocks shared by a Swedish deli and a Persian restaurant, a feminist bookstore and a Mexican grocer? What agency could envision a vintage apartment building whose resourceful owner offered his Tibetan tenants–the neighborhood’s most recent arrivals–the incentive of converting a spare room to a Buddhist temple?
The planner’s instinct is to trim out all the natural messiness of urban life in favor of tidy formulas. “Planners often see themselves as theologians of public policy,” a former city planning commissioner once confessed.
A string of rubble-filled empty lots along the ward’s southern border–the residue of ’60s-style urban renewal–illustrates that the 48th Ward long has been a battleground over which two distinct philosophies of government have struggled.
In fact, that battle has been taking place all across America and is one of the reasons so many of us sense we are becoming a nation of strangers.
Thomas Jefferson observed that the people of a community know more about their problems and how to solve them than some distant bureaucrat. For the past 60 years, that Jeffersonian ideal has been replaced by planning that comes down from on high.
By the 1960s, the 48th Ward had become a target for that new philosophy of government. Older residents were joining the wave of Americans moving to suburbia, creating a human vacuum in many of the neighborhood’s apartment hotels. Those vacancies offered an easy solution to state officials charged by the courts with the problem of deinstitutionalizing mental patients. Within a decade, this small ward housed 38 percent of all patients discharged from Illinois’ mental hospitals.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development also discovered the 48th Ward, putting up a number of low-income projects.
“Some HUD buildings worked here,” Smith said, “but others didn’t. The point is that no one solution fits all cases.”
One spectacular example of a HUD project that didn’t work is a 281-unit high-rise building tucked into the south end of the ward. It became what Smith calls “a killer building,” one that murdered development all around it. Residents used to amuse themselves by taking target practice at the windows of the McCutcheon-Branch elementary school below. Eventually, pressure from the community brought in new management by a not-for-profit organization that screens tenants and has cleaned up the building.
“We’ve found,” she said, “every problem is also an opportunity to make people feel powerful.”
In the late 1960s, the ward was demoralized to the point that there was not a single operating neighborhood group. Decades of fighting bureaucrats has built a network of three chambers of commerce, four community organizations, five minority business groups and 27 block clubs.
Even now, it’s not easy to live in the 48th. Residents say that in the suburbs they wouldn’t need such constant vigilance to keep their neighborhood viable. But the 48th offers benefits not to be found in suburbia, noted Nan Sullivan, a member of the Pierce Elementary School council, who stopped Smith to chat.
“Beautiful computers and high test scores are only part of a school experience,” Sullivan said. “My son’s best friend is black. That wouldn’t likely happen in a suburban school. “
Smith continued up Clark, past antique stores and travel agents offering passage to a dozen and more Old World homelands. She stopped to say hello to restaurateurs and grocers selling Persian, Japanese, Thai, Mexican, Peruvian and Arab foods.
When she was young, Smith’s family moved from a similar ethnic melange to a northwest suburb. She remembers feeling cheated of street life.
“When we lived just off Milwaukee Avenue in the late `50s,” she said, “you’d hear Rosemary Clooney singing on one neighbor’s radio, the ballgame would be playing on another. I’d sit and watch somebody washing the maggots out of a garbage can. Everybody was always fixing and painting. Once we left the neighborhood, I never saw any of that. That’s no way for a kid to grow up.”
